What was there left for him to be proud of now? Who was she any more? No sharp suits, no strutting in and out of the Inns of Court, aware of ordinary people watching her and wondering how important she was, no status-enhancing boyfriend with all the trappings he had brought with him.

A life for a life.

Now all the trappings were gone, she wasn’t sure what was left. She had always defined herself by what she did rather than by who she was, by what she wore on the outside instead of what was happening on the inside. Status had shaped each part of her, moulding her into what she had become. So where did that leave her now it was all gone? Drifting with neither rudder to steer her nor anchor to hold her safe. It was terrifying.

Pip climbed into her bed, but instead of burying herself beneath the covers she propped herself up against the headboard and stared at her childhood, preserved shrine-like in this room. She felt eerily calm. In the space of six months, every aspect of a life she’d thought was secure and stable had collapsed or evaporated. So why wasn’t she crying? Where were the howling tears of anguish, the breast-beating and lamentations that she might have expected to follow such a catastrophic turn of events? Her eyes were dry. Apart from a pivot towards the philosophical, which had taken her by surprise but was not upsetting in itself, she felt fine.

But that couldn’t be right. She must be in shock or something, or maybe her precarious mental state had rendered her incapable of processing what had just happened. It was true that feeling numb had become something of a habit with her recently, but this felt different. This wasn’t a lack of emotional engagement due to trauma, like before. This was something closer to acceptance. Pip probed her emotional depths and found that she was okay. In fact, she was more than okay. She actually felt relieved. She now knew exactly where she stood. With Dominic gone from her life, there was absolutely nothing left.

She was empty, a vacuum, a void.

11

Pip didn’t sleep that night; she didn’t even try. She stayed where she was, propped up against the headboard, staring out at the dark night sky through her narrow window. It had been early evening when she retreated to her room, the faded chintzy curtains not yet pulled against the night, and so she had followed the progress of time by watching the colour of the sky slide through orangey-pink to midnight blue and back to pink again. Stars twinkled and then disappeared, and the moon, wafer-thin, slinked past on its inexorable path to the west.

At not long after three she heard the cockerel start up. When she had first come back to the farm he had woken her every morning. In London she slept through revellers and sirens and the clarion cries of endless burglar alarms without even stirring, and yet the plaintive crowing of one cockerel had cut through her sleep like a knife.