Ross looks up, surprised.

“It’s too much,” I tell him. “All this bad news.”

He scrapes the last of his boiled egg with a teaspoon. “She wouldn’t have known a thing about it. I guess that’s the only consolation for her parents. Even at relatively low speeds, a train has so much mass and energy, the body’s usually destroyed pretty much straightaway.”

I take my empty mug to the kitchen and rinse it out. My chest feels tight, as if my lungs are constricted. I want to ask him if he really believes that, if knowing their daughter has been smashed to pieces pretty much straightaway is a consolation for her parents, but I let the comment pass, unchallenged, because I don’t want to have a conversation about it. Not right now. Not ever.

I try not to think, but it’s impossible. Another life wiped out in seconds. Another bereaved family.

Ross follows me out and gives me a sheepish grin. “Sorry, it’s just the way my brain works.”

I shake my head at him. “Tell me about it.”

What Ross doesn’t realize is that I know exactly what happens to a body when it’s hit by a train. I looked it up once, a long time ago. Couldn’t stop myself. It depends how fast the train is traveling, and whether the body is upright or lying on the ground at the time of impact, but basically all the vital organs are smashed, the major blood vessels broken. Sometimes the body is flung into the air; sometimes it gets rolled up under the wheels and ground into little pieces. Broken bones. Mangled flesh. Severed limbs.

I had to know. I just had to. And then I filed the information away and didn’t access it again. Buried it deep. But it’s always there, ready to infiltrate my conscious mind whenever a train-related tragedy occurs. Especially when children are involved. Especially when it’s a young girl. Like Alice.

I blink to dispel the image that’s just landed in my head and scrutinize Ross as he stands at the kitchen door, gazing out at the garden and the crop of daffodils that have sprung up through the grass. He’s still wearing his tracksuit bottoms and T-shirt, and the early-morning sunlight illuminates his fair skin. There’s a malleable quality about him this morning, as if he could quite easily be a student, a sales assistant, a lad behind a bar. But in less than half an hour he will have transformed himself into a GP, his mind already fixed on the day ahead. He will have solidified into a “pillar of the community,” as I jokily call him.

I keep meaning to tell him about Alice—he is my fiancé, after all—but somehow it never seems like the right time. Besides, if I tell him, he might ask me questions I can’t answer.