‘Joe,’ she says softly.

He reaches a hand to his pocket, but it’s merely a gesture. It’s going to accompany his explanation of why he can’t hand over his phone. There is no smoke without fire, to Lydia, and so she simply says, ‘Okay,’ and turns away from him, stalking into the bathroom to get a glass of water.

‘Lyds.’

‘You’ve made your position very clear,’ she says to him when he arrives. ‘There is something on that’ – she points to his pocket, at the rectangular embossed shape – ‘that you don’t want me to see.’

‘I deleted Evan’s text. It was stupid. Because it made me anxious.’

‘Show me the phone or fuck off.’

Something flits across his face, but Lydia can’t read it. Can’t name it. Something like anguish. His eyes crease at their corners. He shows his teeth. ‘No,’ he says.

In 1995 Lydia’s mother was given a choice. Leave with Lydia to keep her safe, or stay. And she stayed. And so Lydia will never stay. Not with somebody who hurts her. She lives with Joe’s sharpness on the basis that she is never on the receiving end of it. He might be rude about dog owners and people who cut him up in traffic. He might say he hates how Evan has to say, ‘The mighty, mighty York,’ whenever he talks about where he’s from, but Joe never ridicules Lydia.

‘Okay, then. Your choice,’ she says.

Joe starts brushing his teeth. Lydia looks at him in the mirror for a few seconds, wondering what all this means.

As they get ready in silence, she looks at Joe’s body from under lowered lashes. He looks hunched. Despite herself, Lydia feels a rolling wave of sympathy for him, like shivery thunder moving across her body. No, she tells herself. No. We do not feel sympathy for people who cause us pain. She gets into bed and turns deliberately away from him.

Lydia wakes because Joe isn’t sleeping. It’s impossible to sleep next to somebody who is turning over, disturbing the sheets, obviously frustrated. Like trying to sleep through an argument, only Joe seems to be having it with himself.

She rolls over and opens her eyes, looking at Joe’s back. He must sense this, and turns to face her. They look at each other for a few seconds in the darkness.

The whites of his eyes look blue in the shifting moonlight, which moves in shadows across their bed, like the night sky is turning over as he is too.

‘What’s going on, Joe?’ she whispers. She can only say it here, eye to eye in the night-time, not able to see any of his body language.

‘Nothing,’ he says, but he comes closer to her. A warm hand arrives in hers underneath the duvet, and she closes her eyes.

‘I promise, there is nothing happening that you need to know about,’ he says, but his words are sad, dampened, laced with fuzz. ‘I want you to trust me.’