Jake had left before me, as though he couldn’t bear to watch, giving Paddy a quick peck on the head, calling out Goodnight, sleep tight from the doorway. When I got downstairs, he was sitting at the kitchen table. He was drinking whisky from a heavy glass, the top buttons of his wrinkled work shirt undone.

Perhaps, I thought, this was how my mother and father felt after one of their fights. There was nothing we could do to take it back. Nothing in human history that said you could make things un-­happen, take them away from memory, away from the mind. I once heard about a drug that gives the recipient amnesia after a traumatic injury or event. But presumably no doctor would give it to Paddy, for having witnessed whatever he’d seen.

I went to sit next to Jake, tried unsuccessfully to pull my dress around my breasts, over my stomach and legs. I reached for my glass of wine from the counter, sniffed it, made a face.

That wine’s been open for like two months, he said.

There was something in his eyes: amusement, I thought at first. His mouth was completely set, it was hard to tell. For the first time in years, I didn’t know what he was feeling. I could not imagine a single one of his thoughts. Only his actions were clear now: the way he reached over his face with one huge hand, moved his glasses up, rubbed his eyes. His other hand fell loose, palm up on the table.

Without thinking much about it, I shifted my hand until it was next to Jake’s, then over it, flattened against it. He was still covering his eyes with his left hand, the fingers close together, slightly cupped. I could see his breath, moving his shirt up and down. We held hands.

It started off as a squeeze, like when you assure someone you are still thinking of them in the cinema, or at an emotional moment at a wedding. But when I pressed on Jake’s hand, he didn’t press back. Maybe that’s why I did it.

I carried on pressing, harder and harder, knowing my nails were digging in. Jake moved his fingers from his eyes; he looked at our hands, entwined on the table, their different tones blurring together. He breathed in sharply, once. He carried on looking, but he didn’t move his hand away.

Only when I’d stopped, my face feeling hot, a little short of breath, did he speak.

That’s what you want, isn’t it, Lucy? To hurt me.

He was folding his lower lip into his mouth, his eyes were bright, moist, but it didn’t feel like an accusation. It felt like a statement, one of his scientific proclamations, a simple observation based on the facts.

~