The mist continued to drift over and around him while he talked it all out with Angela. He talked about how he and Glenn had argued for the first time in forever; how it wasn’t Glenn’s fault, it was just that he was starting to feel so useless. He was lashing out, he knew that. Angela had told him about it enough. He talked about his job too and how he was now officially retired. He laughed about the plans they had discussed for their retirement: holiday homes, camper vans and that crazy idea of repeating their honeymoon in that terrible little B&B in deepest Wales that had, by all accounts, become even more terrible in the forty-odd years that had followed. He felt better. He always did, but as with any high there was always the inevitability of coming down the other side. For Richard, this came when his coffee ran dry or when the frozen mist finally penetrated his layers – whichever came first.

It was soon time to go.

He took his hand out of his glove to kiss his fingertips, then to rest them gently on her headstone. His shiver was instant and violent. It wasn’t a reaction to the cold but to a vivid memory – the sensation took him back to Angela, to the last time he had seen her. He had followed her ambulance to hospital and his memories of that place were disjointed and partial: vivid white walls and flashes of his wife’s pale skin through the blur of movement that was all around her. Then she was taken away. The next time he saw the same medical staff they were slower, more deliberate and they were looking at him, building up to tell him it had all been for nothing. He didn’t want his last image of her to be desperate attempts at revival, a fight for life. He wanted to see calmness, to see peace.

All he had got was stillness.

Her leg was crushed, her hips out of shape, her hair a clump of blood. They had cleaned her face for him but there was no peace, not to him. He had kissed his fingertips to place them gently on her cheek then and the shock of that sensation was what came back to him now. He ran his eyes over her headstone one last time, lingering on the inscription: To live in the hearts we leave behind is not to die.

‘Then what?’ he scoffed. ‘Then we’re just nothing, are we?’