She called Jem, but there was no answer. She imagined the phone ringing in their small house, echoing through the rooms where the evening sun would be slanting in through the windows, laying its fingers across the cool tiles. It seemed such a very long time ago, another world, that she’d danced in their garden in her orange dress. Everything was like a dream, unreal and preternaturally bright – not just her summer, but her life, episodes strung like gaudy beads in her memory. The little girl who longed for her father; the teenager who listened to her mother weep; the young woman who let herself fall in love as if she was jumping off a cliff and had nothing to break her fall, but it didn’t matter because she knew she would fly; the mother standing over her dead son, unable to weep, because when you weep, the thaw has set in, and the great freeze is over; the betrayed wife standing at the foot of the bed where her treacherous husband lay and hurling abuse at him while he laughed at her.

She was all of these, and yet they felt like strangers to her, far removed from this woman standing in front of the cracked mirror in her bedroom, where she saw herself full length for the first time in weeks, and liked what she saw for the first time in years. She looked slim, strong, sturdy, healthy. Ready for life.

At half past four the next afternoon, when Irene was in the kitchen peeling potatoes for supper, the doorbell rang. Nervous happiness jolted through her; her knees shook, and she pushed her hair behind her ears, wiped her hands against her sides.

Adrian stood at the threshold, a half-smile already in place. He wore a bright blue shirt, which was rolled up over muscled brown arms. His hair was long and his cheeks stubbly. He kissed Irene chastely, carefully, on both her cheeks so she felt his bristles and smelt his old familiar smell. And then he looked at her, the new Irene who had miraculously become the woman he’d fallen for so long ago, wearing a loose yellow dress that he remembered from years back, with soft, bleached hair and honey-coloured skin and bright eyes in a freckled face. She knew by his expression that she was lovely to him once more, after so many years of being invisible. For a second, she thought she would reach out and take his hand in hers, hold it against her cheek for the comfort of it.