Out in the street, everything did look the same, but shot through a slightly different lens. Maybe it had all been shifted a couple of millimetres over? Ruth found her seat on a train where no one spoke, leaned her head against the window and, sure enough, burst into tears, big noisy sobs, her whole body shaking. Sure, she’d cheered and booed at elections as one set of politicians lost and another won, but none of it had ever come quite so close, meant quite so much. She’d never felt the possibility of change for good quite so keenly, never before been quite so partisan that she’d managed to block out dissenting voices if their arguments bothered her.

There was a tap on her shoulder. The conductor was standing there. She fumbled for her ticket and he shook his head, handed her a crumpled fist of toilet paper. He squeezed her arm, a message passed on, and moved slowly up the carriage.

She’d left the office after three hours. Hadn’t had the energy for it. Clio was still in her bed when she got back, and Ruth climbed in beside her, fully dressed. Clio passed her the almost-empty bottle of whisky, turned back to her phone, her hands flying over its surface.

‘I’m gonna take them down, Ruth. Each and every single fucker who comes at me. This is the best possible response I could have to today, isn’t it. Don’t say anything. I’m going to end each one of them individually today.’

Glasgow, 25 January 2018

‘Why would you do a thing, keep doing it, when it gave you no joy and instead put such a strain on you?’ Ruth had tried to ask Alison one night, just after Brexit, having ventured a look at Clio’s Twitter stream and almost physically recoiling from the frenzy, the fur flying. Alison had only looked at her knowingly, and Ruth sensed another lecture about standing up for herself, not letting Clio use her, changed the subject loudly and forcefully.

On the third day after she’d found the body, her second day of occupation of Alison’s sofa, watching the Disney movies of her childhood under blankets, Ruth decided that she’d had enough. Alison’s house was always too hot, and Ruth had no idea how to work the glowing remote-control thermostat that mocked her with a blinking, brazen display of all twenty-two degrees from the centre of the coffee table. ‘Try and stay offline,’ Alison had warned her this morning. ‘It’ll all blow over soon.’ There had been pictures of the outside of her cottage, neighbours from the village interviewed by a couple of the papers. Her boss had texted, saying that he understood she couldn’t really go home or come in, but asked her to maybe think about working remotely tomorrow, if she felt up to it.