The lochan spilled, ran down to the corner of my jaw and onto my chin.

He reached out and blotted it with his thumb. ‘I’ll get you some wine.’

We didn’t talk about it any more. My throat grew hot from the wine and the fire. I talked for a while about uni – I’d spent more time reading in the last three months than I had in the whole of my second year. Passed my retakes. Got my brain on.

Jim told me what he’d been doing to the house, repairing the window frame where it had started to crumble with damp, making a clothes rack, getting a better system for water drainage. He told me which forests he’d been working in and I wondered when he’d started again, and if people had looked at him strangely, or asked him questions. I wondered whether his arms hurt when he manned the harvester. I wondered what he thought about.

I shivered and put my elbows on the table. ‘Can we keep the fire on all night?’

He looked at it, and back at me. ‘It’s not plugged in, you know.’

‘Oh. Yeah.’

‘If you get up a few times, you can. Keep it on.’ There was the trace of a smile. Almost.

‘I’m an idiot.’ I shook my head at myself and put one finger in a wine drop on the table.

‘I won’t want you to get up.’

Bang. My skin crackled, or the fire did. Jim sat very still, the lines in his forehead nearly smoothed away. He reached over and tucked his forefinger under all of mine, and pulled my hand over the table, and my arm with it, and kept gently pulling until I was out of my seat and standing with my knees pressed against his, and until I had to put my hand on his shoulder to balance, and until he’d kissed me.

‘How can you be cold?’ he said.

Nothing of me touched the floor. I was lying on top of him in front of the fire leaning my chin on my hands, which were resting on his chest, which glistened slightly.

‘I am. My toes have fallen off.’ I put my cheek on his neck. A pulse thrummed against my ear. I thought of the blood throbbing from his wrist. ‘I was supposed to cook you a steak.’ I tried to sound extremely sad. ‘I’ve failed.’

‘I don’t call what just went on failing.’ He touched my nose. ‘I’ve eaten now, anyway.’

I pushed myself up to look at him and he slung his eyes from the ceiling to me with a slow smile, the first I’d seen since the evening at the bar, with Lottie. His bottom lip was stained purple and had a faint, buttery sheen.

I hit him.

I was wrapped in a blanket and the blanket was under the duvet. The quiet up here was something I hadn’t realised I’d missed.

I looked up at him. ‘What was it like? In jail?’