She didn’t speak. Oliver didn’t know if she wouldn’t or couldn’t. Instead, she had raised her finger and pressed it against her lips. It was her ‘I love you’. It was her goodbye. He had nodded, just once, his throat swelling with pain.

She had slipped away but Oliver kept hold of her hand, kept speaking her name.

She was gone.

After Clem had died, Oliver couldn’t let his constant questions about consciousness go. What happened to someone if they could no longer communicate? Could they still think? Feel? Remember? Oliver didn’t want to think or feel or remember. He tried to dull his pain with whiskey but he couldn’t dull his thoughts. He rattled around their huge home, tumbler in his hand, unable to settle. Unable to sleep. What had Clem been thinking in those final weeks as she had drifted in and out of consciousness? How much easier would it have been if there had been a way they could have communicated? A way he could have understood the things in her mind. It wasn’t only for her benefit he wished this. He agonized over whether she had blamed him for not insisting she saw a doctor, whether she had stopped loving him. In those last few weeks when she was wracked with pain, was she full of love or hate? Did it bring her comfort, thoughts of him? Of them? Of their wedding day, barefoot on the beach, frothy waves rushing excitedly towards them as they declared until death do us part.

The alcohol soured his breath, burned his throat.

He clanked another empty bottle into the recycling bin and unscrewed the cap from a fresh one.

‘It must be so rewarding to know you’re making a difference,’ Clem had said the first night they met. ‘The world needs more people like you.’

She’d be so sad if she could see him now.

So ashamed.

It was the newspaper article that did it. A photo of him in a crumpled, stained shirt. Hair wild and unbrushed. ‘Is it all over for the once brilliant Chapman?’ the reporter had asked.

Could he make a difference? Be the man Clem wanted him to be? The man he had thought he was? It was too late for her, for him, but what if he could help others? He had previously researched consciousness. Should he carry on? Could he?

‘I’m so proud of you,’ her voice had echoed from the past.

Instead of slugging whiskey into his glass, he had glugged it down the sink and stumbled into his office, waking mid-afternoon, a bitter taste on his tongue, his face pressed to his desk, papers stuck to his cheek. He vowed never to drink again. To continue to make Clem proud.