‘Please come. I’ll come to you,’ Joe garbles. ‘Meet me in the outhouse.’

Cathy meets Tom’s brown eyes. His hand is still on her waist, the other still extended in an open gesture for her phone. ‘I can’t,’ she says. ‘I can’t – Joe.’

‘What?’

‘This has gone too far.’

‘No, Cath. I didn’t mean to do it. He – he fell.’

‘How did you do it?’

‘A punch,’ Joe says. He swallows again. Cathy hears his Adam’s apple moving up and down in his throat, a dry, dragging sound.

‘Joe – I can’t, I …’

Cathy wordlessly passes the phone to Tom, who hangs it up. He puts it on the table and stands there, his hands on his hips.

‘I think I’m going to be sick,’ Cathy says. ‘I can’t … he’s fucking killed someone.’

The shade is back over Tom’s eyes. He avoids contact with her for a second, sighs and sits down on her sofa. Cathy joins him.

‘Look, I don’t want to tell you what to do,’ Tom says, a hand on her bare knee, his eyes on her phone.

Cathy puts her head in her hands and rakes her hair back from her face. ‘What do I do?’ she says. ‘Tell me what to do, Tom.’

He says nothing, his hand not moving from her knee.

‘I just want to go upstairs and get into bed and not wake up again.’

Tom laughs, a small, sad laugh. ‘Sounds good,’ he says. He can’t stop his eyes darting to her phone. The vessel through which they heard the news that changed their lives forever. Again.

‘What would you do?’ His body is completely still, and Cathy is grateful for his calm, her port in this storm.

He glances at the phone again, and that’s when Cathy understands what he’s saying.

‘You think I should hand him in.’

‘He’s killed somebody,’ Tom says, sitting back and making an expansive gesture with the wingspan of his arms. Her knee is cold where his hand used to be. ‘This is … you’ve got to do the right thing.’

‘For who?’

‘For you,’ he says simply. ‘And for him. Everyone has a limit.’

He hands her the phone, and, this time, she takes it. ‘I need to tell him first,’ she says, taking the phone but pausing. ‘I need to tell my brother that I’m ending this.’

Tom is waiting for her when she gets back from the outhouse, an exchange she is not ready to think about, not yet ready to dwell on.

He raises his eyes to her, and she dials.

The heat from outside is still on her skin as she makes the call. She speaks to a calm 999 operator, tells them what she knows, tells them the address and then she hangs up, just like that. This must be shock, she is thinking. Everything looks the same. Her sofa. Her boyfriend. She is suddenly tired, wanting to lay her head in his lap and fall asleep.