‘I wasn’t out,’ he says.

‘The clocks went back. I was waiting on the landing. I saw you come back and you –’

‘Hey?’ Todd says loudly.

‘What?’

He pauses, maintaining eye contact, exactly the way he did last night when it was him performing impossible tasks, not her. ‘The clocks go back tonight.’ He doesn’t take his eyes off her. Some internal elevator plunges down the centre of Jen’s chest. She pushes her hair off her face and heads to the family bathroom at the back of the house, holding up one finger to Todd for just a second.

She is sick into the toilet, the sort of sick she hasn’t been in years. Alcohol sickness. Norovirus sickness. Hardly anything comes up, only a sticky yellow stomach acid that sits right at the bottom of the water. She stares and stares. Tries to think.

Todd does not know what she is talking about. That is clear. Even he wouldn’t deny this. But why? How?

The pumpkin. The pumpkin is missing. Why does that feel so significant? Where the fuck is her husband?

She sits against the cold shabby tiles. It’s forever on their list to renovate, but they never get to it. Kelly’s own DIY never gets done.

She gets her phone out of her pocket and stares at it, bringing up the calendar.

It is the thirtieth of October. The clocks do indeed go back tonight, and tomorrow will be Halloween. Jen stares and stares at that date. How can this be? She was mistaken. All day yesterday, she’d thought it was the thirtieth, but it wasn’t. It must have been the twenty-ninth. A simple error.

No pumpkin on the windowsill. And Todd in his bedroom, saying he has no idea what’s going on. Not a simple error.

She navigates to her last text message with Kelly and presses call.

He answers warily, but immediately, as he has done for exactly the last six months. Since Nicola Williams. ‘Look,’ she says, a tiny, sarcastic laugh escaping.

‘Baby – what?’ She leans into his affection. Her husband, the romantic.

‘Where are you?’

‘At work,’ he says. ‘Why?’

‘Was Todd arrested last night?’

‘What?’ She hears him put something heavy down on a hollow-sounding floor. ‘For what?’

‘No, I’m asking you. Was he?’

‘No?’ Kelly says, sounding utterly baffled.

‘But we sat – we sat in the police station. You did your coat up – your hood – right up over your head. The clocks had just gone back, I was … I had done the pumpkin.’

‘Er,’ Kelly says, for once lost for words.

‘Wait – where are you?’ she says.

‘At work …’

‘But where?’

‘Merrilocks Road.’

He said he finished there yesterday. Didn’t he? Yes, she’s sure he did. He was naked as he said it. She can remember it. She can.

She puts her hand to her head. ‘I don’t know what’s going on,’ she says. ‘What did we do? Last night?’ She leans her head back against the wall. ‘Did I do the pumpkin?’