‘I know,’ Jason says quietly. ‘I mean – of course you did. I’d be worried if you hadn’t. Look,’ he says, then stops, appearing to think. ‘To stay in the present – could you – can you think of Paul?’

I close my eyes. Paul. He’s looking more and more like Joe every day. ‘Living up to his middle name,’ Joe said to me, years and years ago. In another life. Before Verona. Sometimes, if I bring Paul very close to me, it is as though I am looking into my brother’s smiling eyes. Brown, straight lashes that point downwards, heavy lids. I almost expect a wisecrack, a flash of quick irritation. Things that belong to Joe and only Joe.

A ginger-haired girl and a woman who is obviously her mother walk by on the street outside. I stare at them. She’s maybe eight. Old to be holding her mother’s hand. I wonder if Paul will hold my hand when he’s eight. I can’t imagine him at eight. He is still so little. Cheeks the colour and texture of fresh, warm peaches. Folds of fat around his elbows and wrists.

‘I offload to you,’ I say to Jason. ‘I don’t let Paul know about it. About why we’re all estranged. About where everyone is. I don’t think he will remember – you know. I don’t think Paul will remember those days when we all worked together and lived in a row of three cottages.’

I close my eyes and can remember them immediately. Rendered white on the outside. Ivy around the windows. Beams above that creaked in the winter rain and winds. Vibrant gardens that smelt of florals.

‘I know.’ Jason reaches to straighten a paper on the table in front of us. ‘But maybe that’s for the best.’ He smiles at me warmly, and the weather seems to thaw outside, just slightly.

5.

Then

Joe

Joe’s mouth tastes acrid, like he’s swallowed poison. His limbs are trembling.

‘What else are we supposed to do?’ Frannie says. Joe wishes she would stop asking him questions. He doesn’t usually mind. Mostly, it’s charming. ‘So,’ she had said right before their holiday, arriving in work wearing a kimono, ‘how long until you send me home for wearing this?’

‘Five minutes,’ he’d said.

Frannie had thrown her head back and laughed. ‘But I’ll still do the job! And look lovely.’

God, she could make him laugh with her verve and her randomness. A fucking kimono.

But nobody is laughing tonight.

‘I am not burying a body,’ Joe says.

‘Neither am I.’ Cathy’s voice is tight.

He runs a hand through his hair. It’s still snarled from sleep. He doesn’t know what they’re supposed to do, but what he does know is that nobody is calling the police.

He has downplayed what happened in the bar on their first night here. He and Lydia had headed gallantly into Verona as soon as their flight landed. One of the many things he loves about Lydia – apart from the fact that she’s fucking funny – is her willingness to embrace life, to squeeze experiences out of it like fresh orange juice. They’d stood on a terrace outside a restaurant, the smell of garlic and candle wax on the breeze, the softly illuminated arches of the Verona Arena across the street from them. Lydia’s legs were long and lean and bare, and she had on the perfume she only ever wore on holiday, suffusing him with good-time memories.