But seeing her portrayed in this angelic light makes the references to me sound ugly and clinical: an epileptic; severe tonic clonic seizures. Maybe if we’d both been hit by the train and I’d survived but been injured, it might have been different. I’d be a victim, too, instead of just the “epileptic” friend who can’t remember what happened.

Perhaps I’m being oversensitive and reading things into it that simply aren’t there. Perhaps the phrase “no apparent recollection” does not imply a question mark hanging over my testimony. I know it’s wrong of me to even think this way. After all, I survived. She didn’t. What does it matter how I was described by a stupid reporter?

I torture myself by imagining the split second before it happened. Did Alice see the train bearing down on her? Did time slow down the way people say it does in moments of danger, her short life spreading before her in a tapestry of colors and emotions?

My scalp tingles as if Alice is shimmering over my shoulder. Reading about her own death. And though I know it’s stupid, I can’t help looking round. I don’t want her to have suffered even a nanosecond of that torment and yet I can’t help feeling she must have done. Why else do I keep seeing these pictures in my head? The terrible panic in her eyes. Her beautiful face contorted by a scream. What monstrous thing is my brain trying to reveal? And why now, after all this time?

I stand up and it feels like I’ve been sitting here for hours. My lower back is stiff, my legs almost numb. I pick up the leaflet for the predictor kit and turn away from the screen, force myself to read the words, to follow the instructions, try to shut everything else out and focus purely on them.

The extractor fan in the downstairs toilet is loud, and for a second I think that Ross will wake up and come down, but he won’t. Of course he won’t. Once Ross is asleep, he’s dead to the world, especially when he’s been drinking.

I start to wee, holding the end of the stick in the flow, then I balance it on top of the roll of toilet paper on the floor and rest my head in my hands, close my eyes and start to count. Sixty seconds. A hundred and twenty. A hundred and eighty.