There’s a comfort in having known someone so long. All the shared bedrock of memories. We talk about the past as if it were a country we could return to any time we wanted. We dredge up moments. Sitting in his parents’ house on Observatory Road in front of a fire. Molly asking Blake to lay down forks and plates for dinner, and Blake complaining that he’s tired. Molly, looking at me, putting on her best Italian-American accent, ‘My son, he has problems, eh? He was born tired.’ All of us laughing. And later, after the table has been cleared, sitting against those upholstered chairs – Tom, Molly, Blake and I playing Scrabble. So, this is also family, I’d thought. We seem to have moved from house to house as easily as flies, and here we are, sitting in this house by the sea, chewing on olives, the flesh around their pitted hearts.

‘What about Misrak?’ Blake asks. ‘Do you still keep up with her?’

‘We’re terrible communicators. We talk maybe once a year on the phone but it’s always this hour-long conversation, rushing to say everything, and then we feel caught up and can move on with our lives. But I miss the everydayness of having a friend nearby. Someone you can have coffee with, someone you can go out with.’

‘And this man you’re seeing?’

‘That’s finished now.’

‘That’s too bad.’

‘I hadn’t expected it to last.’

‘The thing is,’ Blake says, ‘I’ve met someone too.’

He dismantles everything. He’s telling me about her. She’s an architect. English with American ancestry. Emma. Loves Bauhaus and the Brutalists. Keeps parrots. Grew up on a farm in Hereford. I’m listening to him and it’s as if I’m travelling far from every place we’ve just visited. All those houses and fields, all those roads we just walked with our palms sticking together. Everything I had once wanted to move away from but now long to hold close. That girl I was getting to know again, she has vanished, leaving me only with this life, the one where I live alone with my sister, a pack of dogs and the wilderness.

‘Stop talking,’ I say. ‘Please.’

But he keeps going, because he’s earned the right to speak.

A sudden vision of the future. I am going to be one of those women who is alone. In her car, in restaurants, in the rooms of this house, waiting for a sign from the world. A telephone call. A letter. Nothing will come.

‘We’ll always know each other, Grace. We’ll always be in each other’s lives.’

‘No we won’t. You’ll fall through. One day I won’t remember your face.’

‘That’s crazy, come on.’