It’s strange to be continuing our session out here, in the dark frost, but I like talking to Jason and his clear mind so much that I find I don’t care. ‘You walking that way?’ I say, gesturing to the direction he always goes in.

‘Yeah. I’m almost late,’ he says, rotating his wrist to check his watch. I nearly ask then but stop myself. The relationship is one way: must stay so, for it to work. I confide my secrets to him, but get nothing in return. He is objective and me subjective, upset and wounded by the loss of my family, my estrangement from Mum and Dad, even from Joe.

We fall into step beside each other. It’s the wrong direction for me, but that doesn’t matter. I have nowhere else to be, not really, not right now.

‘You know, I’m actually not surprised they haven’t been in touch,’ I say, as we pass a pound shop just closing for the night, navy-blue shutters noisy and crass in the soft mist.

‘No?’ Jason prompts, not seeming to mind the overrun of our session.

‘No. They just …’ I think of Joe, in particular, and how everything fell apart. My role in it, his role in it, the way he looked at me the night it all unravelled. It was the night that everything got discovered, just not in the way we thought it would be. ‘I think … probably …’ I say hesitantly, ‘I just think they actually only thought about themselves, in the end.’

Jason lets out a sad laugh into the winter air as we come to a set of traffic lights. He jabs the button with his index finger and the WAIT sign illuminates his hand orange for just a second. I look behind me, back to his building, and at the side-by-side set of footprints we’ve made in the frost.

‘You know,’ he says, throwing a sidelong glance at me, ‘I have family who are just the same. It isn’t you. It’s them.’

‘Thank you,’ I say, not knowing quite how to convey the meaning to him, my confidant. We cross the street in silence and Jason curves us around to the left, down an alleyway lined with rubbish bins and out into a small square.

‘This is me.’ He looks up at a sixties-style brown building. It has small square windows, wooden cladding, like an old high school or sports centre. It’s unmarked, no sign telling me what it is. I look at it curiously and hope he takes the hint. ‘Until next time,’ he says, two fingers on his right hand touching briefly to his forehead, a semi-salute. He heads inside, pushing a dark-wood door with a letterbox across it, messenger bag slung across his body, and leaves me in the cold.

9.

Then

Cathy

Much like a return journey seems to take less time than an outgoing, putting the earth back over William is an easier task than it was digging it out. Cathy is amazed she is capable of thoughts like this, monstrous thoughts about the administration of killing, but the adrenaline has run out. The panic can’t sustain itself. It is a firework with no gunpowder left. Her shoulders and arms scream with pain. Anxiety is Joe’s Achilles heel, but Cathy’s will be guilt. With each layer of soil that suffocates William McGovern, Cathy thinks of something else he is deprived of. A funeral. His family of knowledge. An ending, a proper ending, with respect, not this.