She jumped into action, when Joe called, even though Tom was over. She ushered him out, his expression somewhere between confused and fine, as is his way. She feels the breeze cool the tears on her face as she stares and stares at the horizon. Who is she? Why does she answer these calls from people who cause her this pain? The questions seem obvious, all of a sudden, though she’s never once asked them.

The night sky is still and ancient. Sometimes, if Cathy stares for long enough, she gets a dizzying feeling of her own insignificance, of the infinity of the universe beyond them. Similar to the feeling she gets when she visits old monuments and imagines how many hundreds of thousands of people have passed over there before her, each with their own set of problems and concerns. She breathes and thinks and stares up at the sky, gulping in the warm summer air as she cries.

At the bottom of Cathy’s garden is a stone outhouse, with a slate-tile roof, boarded-up windows. Ivy creeps up the side of it. Who else has sat here and cried? Cathy thinks. Millions of people. People in the 1940s during the war. People in Victorian times, with a single candle illuminating their faces. Millions. Hundreds of millions. She once read that one hundred and seven billion people have ever existed, and the thought comforted her then, as it does now. She is here, by herself, not in her siblings’ houses, wanting them to come to hers. She is alone.

Everything is unresolved. They’ve left it as they found it: a mess. Joe stormed off home. Cathy is alone now, wondering what the hell they’re going to do. The components of their mess orbit around her as she stands there, shivering in the darkness.

When she feels calmer, she turns, ready to walk back inside. Only one window is lit up in their block of houses. Paul’s bedroom, the second window on the left. An egg-yolk-yellow square in the night. Frannie is leaning over his bed. Cathy can see only her thick plait of dark hair, her slender arms. Even now, in the worst of times, the love is so obvious, the smile Frannie can’t help but let tug at her features as she gazes down at him. An ironic smile, an indulgent smile, just for him. She loves him. She loves him so much. She wouldn’t survive being parted from him. She loves him so much. Even now. Even in the darkness. It’s there.

‘This rain,’ Cathy says, when Tom answers his door the next evening.

‘I know,’ he says, a hand to his chest as he reaches with the other to take her coat. ‘It’s mad.’

‘It’s impossible to do anything,’ she says. Her hair is soaked through from just walking from her car to his door. ‘Where’s it all coming from?’

‘Who knows,’ he says. ‘Never understood weather systems,’ he says over his shoulder.

‘So this is you,’ she says simply.