‘Well. I – I mean. I saw this happen.’

‘You saw what happen?’ He holds her gaze, waiting.

‘I saw Todd stab somebody with this.’

‘While you were asleep?’

‘I wasn’t asleep.’

‘What,’ he says, the word not lilting upwards, not a question, just a statement of disbelief.

‘Yesterday, I carved a pumpkin and then waited up for Todd and he – he knifed someone, on the street.’

‘But …’ Kelly rubs a hand over his chin. ‘But you didn’t. You didn’t do that.’

Jen turns away from him. ‘I don’t know what I did,’ she says, thinking of that smooth, uncut pumpkin, thinking too of the knife. That knife is the only piece of evidence she has that she isn’t crazy.

‘Look, we’ll just ask him about it. When he gets back,’ Kelly says. ‘And remind him that it’s a firearms offence.’

Jen nods, saying nothing. What else can she do? Lock him up? Because of … because of what? It didn’t happen. She looks at Kelly, whose expression she can’t read. It hasn’t yet happened.

Kelly’s gone to bed, the same as he did yesterday, and Jen’s stayed up. She has not carved the pumpkin, didn’t want to, didn’t want to connect the pumpkin and the murder, as though by not doing one thing it will stop the other.

She makes a different tea to last time, in a different mug. This mug says Colonel Grumpy on it, an insult she once levelled at Kelly in a fury that made her incoherent and – according to him – amusing. It’s one of their things. Their in-jokes, enshrined forever on mugs. They have tens of them.

Eleven becomes midnight becomes one. The thirtieth ticks over into the thirty-first, just as it did last night. She spends the entire evening on her phone, flicking through celebrity before and after surgery photographs.

Three chamomile teabags into the kitchen bin. Three circulations of the living room clock.

Kelly wasn’t where he said he was five months ago, the second time in six months that it’s happened. He was with a woman called Nicola Williams. Jen knows because it flashed up on his phone while he was in the shower. ‘Thanks for today x’ it said. Nicola Williams is a depressingly common name, and Kelly has no social media, so Jen can’t search his contacts. She is keeping her counsel about it for three reasons: one: because she knows, if he was innocent, that it would destroy him that she asked; two: because, if she confronts him now, he will likely hide further indiscretions before she can find them herself; and finally, three: because it would break her fucking heart if he said he loved someone else.

She bargains with the universe. Maybe not an affair. Let Todd be wayward, stupid about knives, but not a killer. And let this not be extramarital sex. Anything but sex.

Her eyes become heavy at half past one. She thought the adrenaline would carry her through, but it doesn’t. She knows it was nothing. A random event that will be consigned to the past. A dream. A bit of confusion. Stress, maybe, her brain’s way of escaping her real problems. Now that it’s late, and the mug is different, the tea different, she can see that this is ridiculous. This bedtime vigil.