We used to sleep like dead trees. Weight on weight. At first, there was a comfort to it, then a kind of dismay.

I shovel love for you, I will keep digging and digging. This is what Blake writes, what he remembers. The times we sat together in bed and binged on The Sopranos, the ransacking of each other’s bodies, the glory.

In the beginning I could not stop touching him. The graze of stubble along his cheeks, the soft globes of his deltoids. He had small, pea-green eyes made to look sad and pulpy by the thicket of dark eyelashes that encased them. A neck of wire. Facing the mirror together, I sometimes thought, He is me, I am him – the longness in our faces, those high, heartbreaking foreheads.

No one ever said we weren’t suited for each other. I had expected it from Papi, who could always be relied upon to scout out the souring in anything. But instead, he took Blake to breakfast and said, ‘I’m so happy to hear you’re marrying Grazia. She was such an awkward, lonely child. Always in her room, listening to her Walkman. I always worried that she would never find someone because there is something so stubborn in her nature.’ Blake and I had got engaged in Venice. I wandered the markets of Rialto while Papi offered Blake one of his Montecristos, to which Blake said, ‘Thanks, Mr Marisola, but I don’t smoke.’ Later, in the room, Blake said, ‘Your father was very kind. He kept asking me to call him Jack.’

When I rang to tell Ma, she said, ‘He’s a good boy. Slightly tepid, but a good boy.’

Over the years I watched him, as couples will watch each other, looking for signs of betrayal, and I saw that he was exactly as he was. Everything he presented of himself was true. Nothing in him would ever surprise me, and it was this lack of guile that began to gnaw at me.