How like a priest he is in that moment, counselling us, fearfulness present in the shine of his eye. I lean in and kiss him on the cheek. Does he have any idea how fervently I wish he could drive me away from here? Can he guess from my face at the great seam of emptiness that opened within me when that gun went off – as if my own body absorbed the bullet?

The house is dark now, and cold. Inside, the air feels very still. Mark goes into the kitchen, but I hesitate in the hall. I look at the coats hanging on the row of hooks, and the shoes lined up neatly in the racks. Everything in order. Nothing out of place. And I think of the limbs that won’t fill those clothes now, the feet that will no longer step into those shoes. The house phone sits on the hall table, and I remember a night, hurrying down this staircase to answer the call, Valentina Catto’s hesitancy on the line, her vague reluctance. A feeling, she said. An intuition. Some blurred outline of threat like dark forms gathering just beyond the field of her vision. A premonition? But I had casually waved it aside, knocked it over with the force of my optimism, talked her into ignoring her own sense of dread.

After a minute I follow my husband into the kitchen, watch while he pours himself two fingers of whiskey, flinging his head back as he swallows it down. It is almost midnight. ‘You want one?’ he asks me, and I nod my agreement. I don’t know how to do this, I think. I don’t know how to be. Mark pours us both a glass, but he doesn’t knock this second one back. Nor does he come and join me where I sit at the table in the snug. Instead he stands there swirling the liquor in his glass, looking as if he is about to say something, and a hard push inside me wants to shout: Don’t! Just, don’t!

‘I keep thinking,’ he says, ‘of that dinner we had. In France, with Val and Guy.’

He is speaking softly, his voice dry and hoarse.

‘I keep thinking of that story you told them – that anecdote about the child psychiatrist you met. Back when Beth was a baby.’

‘It is always the fault of the mother.’ I say the words calmly, but there’s a fire in my head.

‘I don’t know why it came back to me.’

It’s been there in the background ever since we exchanged that glance above Beth’s head. I had seen it in his eye: the flash of disquiet, the hardening of a soft doubt that was already there. I know he’s going to ask me now.