Ruth realized what she was sitting on.

‘Would you mind getting off that table, please? It was my grandmother’s.’

It wasn’t; she’d picked it up for a fiver in a charity shop in town. She wondered why she’d said that even as she could still taste the words. The policewoman scuffled and jumped up, like she’d been caught defiling a relic.

If Clio had brought the pills with her, that would mean she’d known, wouldn’t it? That she’d chosen this death, in this place. Chosen Ruth.

Ruth didn’t tell the policewoman this. What would that add, to her report in her neat rounded schoolgirl handwriting? A wee bit of extra colour? The outcome was still the same. Ruth couldn’t have stopped this happening. And why, really, why would she?

A fairly open-and-shut case, the man police said as they were leaving, as the ambulance pulled out into the street. Seven o’clock now; those people walking up the street to get a chippy for dinner would have seen the stretcher tipped slightly as they cantilevered out of the door, would have hushed their conversation to stare. Goggling nosily at all of their futures, like people can’t help but do.

Ruth had always liked the space in her cottage created by people just leaving it, when she could slowly take each room back for herself, get used to where she fitted in amongst her own things again. Today, though, there was silence. Too much of a silence. She stopped still in the hallway and tried to listen. Nothing; there was a large scrape from the stretcher in the new plasterwork at the bottom of the stairs, though. Clio gouging a final proof of her existence onto the wall. The work it would take to cover that up.

Ruth knew without having to go and look that the cat had gone.

Alison had texted to say she’d be there soon. Ruth picked up the half-biscuit the policewoman had left, in a saucer, licked the bitten corner with the very tip of her tongue. She should go for a walk. She should think about food. She should try and look for the cat.

It was the first dead body she’d seen, now she thought of it. It didn’t seem to be formed of the same matter as the living Clio, the one who had hunched over a cup of tea and pushed away her toast this morning (those plates had been washed up, though, she noticed, walking into the kitchen). Just something left behind.

People. She should probably tell people. How did you do that, these days? Make phone calls? Post on Facebook? She imagined the cat out there, spooked and jerky, running away from the strange new smell of the house.