The next few days were hellish for Elle. She moved from room to room with no purpose, lying down in different places as though she might find rest in one of them, since she couldn’t in her own. All thoughts of the hotel and her success with the bank were torn away from her at once, as if they had never existed at all. But it was the walls of the hotel that contained her grief, and it was the hotel that cradled her as she tried to fall into a dream-wrecked impossible sleep in the evenings.

What she felt most of all was a crushing sense of guilt. If she hadn’t been so desperate to have the roof fixed, if she hadn’t needed it done in such a hurry, would this have happened? She knew that Rob had been exhausted, but she hadn’t said anything because she had been avoiding him. How could she have been so blind? Rob had given the family all he had, and she hadn’t thought about what it might be doing to him.

It was simply that he had always been like that, always willing to go the extra mile for you. It was the same instinct that had made him give Elle his jacket when she had forgotten hers when they were young, which made him bring her snacks when she had been studying for exams. There had been a million little things like that. He always knew what you needed, what you were missing. When she met his mother and sister for the first time (Rob’s father had died when he was a child) he had known how uncomfortable she was in the face of his mother’s cold questioning. He had winked at Elle and made faces behind his mother’s back, to put her at ease. Of course, it had the opposite effect of making her feel even more nervous, but that wasn’t the point.

How had she forgotten these things? Moments where it had seemed that they were closer than anyone on earth. It was like he knew her even better than Penny, or her own mother. It was Rob that she had first told when she wanted to be an architect, and he had encouraged her, knowing deep down that he was encouraging her to go away and leave him.

She was so heart-sore that she didn’t know how to get through another day. She would harden herself, tell herself that she needed to pull herself together and then it would overwhelm her again, paralysing her. And not to be able to go to him, to know that it was Celeste by his side, was unbearable. She dragged herself from room to room, the dogs following her, as forlorn and sad as she was.