They married in an embarrassed ceremony shortly before they went to Paris. It was a year after the funeral; he changed suits. Her friends donned confused formalwear. She was having them on, right? No one could be this in love, no one could make this sacrifice. Certainly not her. They thought the production of her life, always entertaining, was never going to end. She spent a lot of time in the bathroom, avoided the food, searched for her mother’s features in her own when they stood side by side in the mirror.

Throughout all of this, the boy said almost nothing and she watched him like he was a crucial witness. Everything she knew about him was mediated through others: his teacher, his father, the guards. He had to speak sometime though. That was the deal in this life – no matter how much you tried to avoid it, you had to speak sometime.

In bed with the man in the weeks before the ceremony – still her boyfriend then, fiancée if she felt like being technical, both terms startlingly trite for what they were trying to do – he held her tightly in his sleep as if she were going to sneak out. A restless one-night stand. His grief had been huge, paralysing, and the guilt was worse. So they put a ban on sadness, binned newspapers, left the television on cartoons of pink hyperactivity.

Grief had a time frame and when they reached the end of that time frame, and he wasn’t recovered and neither was his son, money was the problem. If they had money, they could somehow circumnavigate the time frame. He was in numbers and was constantly trying to beat the morose odds, trying to outrun a train. He wanted to make her happy. It was her turn to be happy. People were the problem for a while, general people and then, more specifically, this country. This country was going to make him exercise, this country was going to make him get up early, this country was going to make him put a brave face on it. Let’s go somewhere, he said, that makes miserable a look, that smiles only when it absolutely has to.

‘Paris,’ she said.

She bought a guidebook and flipped through it before bed. It was just pictures of macarons and rich, oppressive buildings. There was no guidance in it. At night, she curled her body into a promise in answer to his clawing question: she wouldn’t leave them.

*