He opened the car door and for one awful moment she thought he was going to tell her that he had changed his mind, that he wanted to stay, that she would have to go back inside. But he started the engine and pulled into the road, the removal van following them.

He didn’t look back. She looked in the rear-view mirror and watched the flat retreat into the distance, into the past, into memory.

‘It’s over,’ David said.

It’s over.

Chapter One

One

‘It’s going to be the hottest flatwarming party of all time,’ Jamie enthused. ‘I think we should make it a fancy dress party.’

‘Excellent idea,’ said Kirsty. ‘With a theme?’

‘No. No theme. Freestyle fancy dress – come as whoever or whatever you like.’

He fell with her onto the bed in the soon-to-be-vacated bedroom in the house she shared with three other nurses and buried his face in her soft hair. He kissed her neck and breathed in her scent – a cocktail of skin and apricot shampoo and the perfume she applied every morning. Walking into her bedroom, where her fragrance hung constantly in the air, always made him feel happy and loved and sexy. And soon they would be living together. They would be sharing a bedroom and he would live with her fragrance – as part of the background of his life – every day. Breath and hair and skin and sweat and all the atoms and particles shed by their bodies day after day – these things would merge to create an atmosphere that was not solely of Jamie or Kirsty, but of them.

‘What will you dress up as?’ she asked as he unbuttoned his shirt and tossed it behind him so it landed among the stacks of cardboard boxes and packing crates that covered the floor: books and clothes and handed-down kitchen utensils crammed together in a haphazard jumble that Kirsty described as her ‘system’. Old CDs and framed prints and her childhood collection of wooden elephants. Her whole life, packed up and ready to go.

Jamie adopted what he thought was a wicked grin, snaking his hand around her back and pulling her against his bare torso. She kissed his chest and looked up at him with her big brown eyes.

‘What will I go as?’ he asked. ‘How about the devil?’