Rohan had told me not to touch the paintings again; to leave them as Francesca had seen them.

‘Do something, do anything, do the gardening, take a sleeping tablet and go to bed, just don’t go up there,’ he’d said on what we both accepted would likely be our last phone call before he left New York for good. But the pictures were like a scab that had to be scratched – the fingers of my mind itching and rubbing at the thought of the portraits – and I couldn’t stop myself from going up to view them again.

I pushed open the attic door and breathed in the familiar smell of my hideaway: linseed oil and paints, turpentine, Liquin and, below that, the pine of the frames, the old wood of my easels, the scent of canvases, and the distinctive smell of the house itself; of hundred-year-old bricks that have baked in the sun and soaked up the rain; bricks that have heated and thawed and heated and thawed while sheltering those who lived within their walls; and finally the smell of the felt and rafters of the roof itself. And then, splayed across the attic, a nightmare on canvas, were the paintings.

The day had largely been sunny, but clouds were coming in now, shifting the light like a movie in fast-forward. As I stood at the door, a sunbeam fell on the fifth painting; on the suffocating, underwater image, illuminating it while leaving the others in shade. I swallowed, my hand on my throat, my chest tight, a diver run out of oxygen too deep to make it back up – always that struggle to breathe. Then the clouds moved and the painting faded, the gloss of its surface bouncing back the ambient light in a way that prevented me from seeing it properly and my breath returned to normal.

I slid down the wall till I was sitting on the floor, the rough rattan scratching my hands as I faced my paintings. As I drank them in, I felt again the emotion that had gone into each of them; yet, together, they were more than the sum of their parts – their impact as an entire collection unfamiliar to me. It was as if someone else had inflicted this orgy of horror onto Grace’s life. My body was empty; my soul used up and wrung-out like a holey old chamois.

Rain splattered against the window, a sudden round of gunfire, and downstairs the front door slammed, breaking my trance. Footsteps ran up the stairs. I scrambled to my feet, almost too slow: Grace’s head popped around the attic door, her cheeks flushed from the wind outside and her lips parted as she panted after the exertion of dashing up the stairs. She was still in her work clothes and she shoved a strand of hair out of her face.