Completely still.

Cathy had paused in the doorway, dismissing the anxiety she felt. She crossed the room and reached out to touch Rosie, just to check, and she’d been cool. Cooling. Not quite cold but not body temperature either. Cathy’s own body had reacted to the shock by turning boiling. She still remembers that panicked heat even now.

Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, they said. It could happen to any child. Nobody knows what would have happened had Cathy been listening, checking more often.

The rest Cathy hardly remembers. The 999 call, her parents meeting her in the hospital. She only remembers that frost outside, those three candles, the last, bottled feeling of happiness as she had sat hand in hand, a teenager, with that boy Sean, whom she’s not ever seen since.

The only other thing that Cathy remembers is what she overheard. Mother-to-father, wife-to-husband, in what they thought was the quiet privacy of their kitchen, Cathy heard it.

Well, she’s always done whatever she wanted to do without thinking.

Cathy can see as an adult that that is an unfair assessment – she was a normal teenager; active, yes, selfish too – but nevertheless. It has come to define her adulthood. Every word ventured on dates is second-guessed. Life lived in greyscale, muted, always at work. It must be self-sabotage, she realizes now; bad things happen right after good things, right after you let go.

Cathy looks up at this man who doesn’t seem to give a shit about anything at all. And see how happy he is, getting pissed on and smiling at her. Living his life in the rain. ‘Do you know what?’ Cathy says, looking up at him, rain dribbling down her forehead. She could try. She could try to be less shy. She could try to reach out. ‘Fuck it. Let’s.’

35.

Now

Jason’s Office, mid March, 5.00 p.m.

‘All right,’ Jason says. ‘We have what we call disclosure in – from the other side.’

‘Oh,’ I say, the term vaguely familiar to me, as legal jargon sometimes is. Proceedings, witnesses, defendants, the accused … I stare at my hands in my lap as I sit opposite him.

‘So I have been through it,’ Jason says, and I feel my shoulders sag with relief. It’s not my job, I sometimes have to remind myself. It is actually his job, to finish this, to help me, to end it.

‘Okay,’ I say in a small voice. Now that he’s told me, I see that the disclosure is spread out in lever arch files with my name on their spines. Three, four, five of them. They seem to crowd in. All that documentation about something that happened in a split-second.

There are three half-drunk mugs of coffee on Jason’s desk and his hair is more snarled than usual.

‘And matched it up to your statement that I took.’

‘Right. Is it bad?’

‘No, it isn’t bad,’ Jason says, but his voice elongates on the final word, emphasizing it, like shining a spotlight on to it.