But I remember, she insisted to herself. All around her the hubbub of people’s everyday conversations rose like the surf. I saw the Birdmen. But she’d gone back to the original video, and she had to admit it hadn’t looked that convincing. And wasn’t it more likely she’d invented the snow and the monsters and the doubled perspectives? To believe that she’d lost hold on reality, in her grief, was a hypothesis that fit perfectly with the general parameters of reality. Whereas to believe the other thing meant that everything else about the world was called into question, and did she want that, honestly?

It’s not about what I want. It’s about what’s real. But was it, really? She should accept that she’d had a breakdown, that Mal was gone, that nobody had called her. She could then, perhaps, move on.

Because there was that one other thing, which she had stoically ignored until now. She remembered the call—she told herself she did—but her phone didn’t. There was no entry in her phone’s history for any incoming contact. She might as well have spoken with a ghost.

Right. Well, then… She should just go. No point wasting more of the evening. She abandoned her table, almost colliding with the moustachioed barista as he came to take her cup. He smiled at her, recognizing someone who’d been stood up, albeit not someone stood up by a freak of their own defective subconscious. It was that shame, perhaps, that moved Lee to order another and sit back down. Shame, and a stubbornness her parents had been remarking on since she was five.

The lean, broad-shouldered man across the cafe sat down too and stared furiously into his newspaper.

Lee froze, then got her e-reader out and tried to do the same thing. He had been sitting down, she was sure, just one of the anonymous punters desperate for an overpriced and over-explained shot of caffeine. But he’d been about to leave when she did, and changed his mind just as suddenly.

She stole a glance at the man. His face was invisible behind one of the more lurid tabloids. He hadn’t cut out little eyeholes through which to spy on her. She felt foolish. And yet she couldn’t rid herself of the certainty that he’d been about to follow her.

She stared furiously at her book again, taking in none of it. Ten o’clock had been and gone. She tried to get some research done but, eventually, she was forced to acknowledge that the cafe had mostly emptied out. She looked around suddenly, hoping to catch Tabloid Man unawares. In the intervening time he had left without her noticing, and she ended up glowering at a pair of young men who seemed genuinely intimidated by her.