Back at Rosa’s, Matty had gone up to the attic again and pulled the box over, emptied it out. The rest of the week was spent folding and unfolding cards, looking under the flaps of boxes before they were chucked down into the hallway, and until the attic was bare.

Fourteen years of thinking he was dead. Of swimming in the Ladies’ Pond and the Mixed Pond before going further afield, always thinking of him when in the water. Nibbled by fish and his bones turned to pond-mulch.

Fourteen years of stories of what might have happened to him, newly shaped as Matty got older. He’d borrowed money to put on a horse, couldn’t pay the guy back when it had lost and things had escalated, a car boot opened, bin bags and masking tape. He’d got into heroin, overdosed while holed up in some skag-head’s tenth-floor council flat. He’d always died, because that was the only explanation for him having gone.

Fourteen years of imagining what he’d say about things. The Berlin Wall coming down. Hillsborough. Barnet going up to the Fourth Division. Labour winning. Princess Di. Fourteen years of having his voice right there, saying About bloody time or You bleedin’ beauty or He’s a chancer that one, but I tip my hat to him.

For a day, Matty skulked about in the almost-empty house, sweated in a sleeping bag all night on the living-room floor, wanting Rosa. Wanting her hand, even just to sit next to her, one arm against the cool of her silk blouse. Because he had left. He had left both of them. He’d never called.

But in the middle of the night, with the streetlight pouring through the window, Matty had sat up.

She’d said he was dead. Rosa hadn’t blinked, that time in the kitchen in Golders Green, and said he was dead.

Matty slammed a fist into the wall, knuckles first. Drove it in harder, again and again, as if it were a boxing opponent, as if it were Rosa’s cheek, her chest. Scraped at the wallpaper until it began to peel away, until a fingernail creased back and revealed skin.

I’ll be in touch soon.

There’d been no more letters in the attic. No trace. Had he called? Did she talk to him? Matty tried to remember her leaving the phone ringing, and couldn’t, one way or the other.

But they hadn’t stayed at Golders Green all that long after the summer holidays. Rosa had moved them to the Finchley flat, before the two years in Italy. Too many memories, she had said.

Nonna. Matty phoned, asked her about him. Had Joe called? Written? The slight hesitation on the line was enough to know that they’d been in on it.