Father came down the steps. He started walking faster, then broke into a kind of shuffling run, trying to get to me before I reached the gate. It would have been locked, normally, but Morcenx had been paying his visit and the gate had been opened for him.

‘Fura . . .’ Father called, and there wasn’t anything in his voice but breath, all ragged and dry.

Then he stopped. I thought he’d had the sense not to chase me, but it wasn’t that. He was touching his chest, looking down at where he had his hand pressed, a dark dawning surprise on his face. Then he toppled forwards, ending up on the ground with his arms tucked under his chest.

It was another of those moments where there were two of me, poised to take different histories. There was a kinder, nicer Fura who went back to her dying father and comforted him, even though she knew it wouldn’t make any difference in the end. And there was the harder, icier one who looked back from the gate and measured these things like they were the numbers used to navigate between baubles, cold and indifferent as the fixed stars.

Setting this down now, scratching out the angles of the letters in a way that’ll never be natural or easy to me – I can’t say I’m proud of what I did, not at all. After all the love he’d given me, I ought to have gone back to him. Ought to have let Morcenx go and treat Father as best he could, not that I think there’d have been much to do. But I didn’t. I just stood there, looking back at him, and it was all I could do to mouth a ‘sorry’, and that one word nearly cost me my resolve. And then I turned, knowing he was dying, knowing I wouldn’t see him alive again, and still I went. You think I was cold, carrying on like that, pursuing my plan just as if nothing had happened to my father? I wasn’t cold at all. It was tearing me wide, what I’d just seen, and tearing me even wider to know that I had to keep thinking of Adrana, no matter how much it had hurt my father or was going to hurt me when the dust had finished settling.

All I could do was keep mouthing that word under my breath, like I was saying it to myself more than him.

Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.

And then we passed through the gate, and a fussy sense of decorum had me latching it properly shut behind us.