‘Where did you learn how to do all this stuff?’ I asked one day, when she came into the kitchen after laying the slabs, a smudge of dirt on her cheek.

She glanced around to make sure you weren’t in earshot. ‘I learnt a lot in prison,’ she said, her cheeks reddening, and she looked vulnerable then. ‘I was there for a long time.’

‘Oh, Daphne.’

I tried to remain strong, for her and for you.

But the nightmares continued and I would wake up during the night covered in a film of sweat. Neil’s face morphed into Victor’s and I was convinced he would find us. After all, Neil had.

I still hadn’t told Daphne about Victor, but the deeper in love we fell, the harder it was not to talk about my past. Not that she ever asked, or pushed. She didn’t talk about her time as Jean either. It was as though we both just wanted to live in the here and now. As though we didn’t exist before we found each other.

‘You must stop torturing yourself over Neil,’ said Daphne, on the many occasions when I had gone to her, shaking and crying, guilt and fear taking me over. She’d pull me into her arms and kiss me and reassure me that it would all be okay. ‘Nobody will ever know,’ she said, but that just made me feel worse. Out of control and vulnerable.

It puzzled me how Daphne didn’t seem to worry about Neil and the fact his rotting remains were buried in our garden. His disappearance had made the papers, after all. He had been married with a young son. The guilt of that ate away at me. Even with the new paving slabs I hated going out there, and every time I did, the memories of that night flooded back. It was hard, especially during that hot summer as you wanted to be in the garden all the time. ‘I’ll go with her,’ Daphne would say, touching my arm gently. And I’d watch, like a prisoner, from the kitchen window as she sat with you as you dug your little spade into the soil and made a small rockery, trying not to wince that the body of the man I had killed lay less than twenty feet away. At night I’d dream of going downstairs and seeing the paving slabs taken up to reveal the hole in the ground, empty, his body gone. Other times I worried that we hadn’t dug deep enough and something, a neighbouring dog or fox, might accidentally dig it up, exposing the corpse. Or that he was still alive, he’d survived the stabbing and was intent on revenge, still wearing his bloodstained T-shirt.