I think of that and the part of me that remembers what it’s like to be a part of something splinters at the thought like raw apple. I never liked to think of neat parts with us, because the part of me that wasn’t him always seemed a little frightening. So I haven’t devised an emergency plan for myself – all I have is a handful of truisms I’ve picked up somewhere: from people, from TV. ‘It’ll be OK eventually.’ ‘You are very brave.’ ‘You do you, girl.’ Occasionally, I have said these things to others, although it was always hard to get the tone right.

Neil has been my only partner: my only long-term, proper partner. There weren’t many others before him and what use would it be to think about them now? You may find that grieving, the booklet says, is like crawling into a deep black pit where there is room for grievance alone. On the rug, my body braces for the smack of absence but it doesn’t connect with the impact. I continue reading. So far, I would say, I have done everything by the book.

At first, of course, I was desperate. I felt I’d been cleaved down the middle, the moist pulp of me suddenly exposed. I knew I couldn’t be out in public. I took time off work; I said I was ill and in many ways I was, or at least I behaved like it. I didn’t eat, wash my hair, change my clothes. It was a relief that it all came so naturally. I cried, or I slept, or I clawed the bedding crying until I fell asleep. It was a black wet sea of a week.

And then it was time to go back to the care home. It was as if someone had flicked the switch back on. I pulled myself together, as they say – or at least I held it together – precariously, because simply presenting myself to the world required my full attention. It was exhausting. For days after I went back to work, I’d find myself standing at the foot of a patient’s bed, in the afternoon light, and for a moment the hurt would fasten itself to my bones, threatening to push me to my knees. Often, my arms felt too heavy to lift. I look up at them, stretched out above my head: this feels like a memory.