It’s a live piece again. He’s on a boat, the burning rig behind him. It’s barely dawn there, and the dim light makes the fiery plumes even more striking. I can’t deny it: it grabs at my stomach to see him there without me, but I’m not sure I’m equipped to interpret the feelings. It’s all too tangled up between us anyway—the personal, the professional, the public and the private, the strands twisted again and again, with links grown over time from one to the other, like a helical coil of DNA. The DNA of us. His silver-gray hair is whipping around in the sea breeze, and he has his gravest face on. I can already tell that there are no positive developments on this story. The search-and-rescue effort is continuing, but the expression of the exhausted spokeswoman in a short insert clip betrays the fact that after nearly thirty-six hours, there can be no reasonable hope. The firefighting effort continues, too, but the rig is listing so heavily that it’s surely inevitable that it must sink. I imagine it slipping soundlessly into the black depths, the incessant fires finally quenched, sinking down and down until it at last comes to rest—a metal skeleton in the ocean’s cemetery. I imagine barnacles growing on it, some form of plant life, perhaps—but no, I’ve missed something with my daydreaming: it seems there is the possibility of a seabed leak, perhaps as much as eight thousand barrels a day . . . Now the skeleton is surrounded by clouds of thick oozing crude oil, streaming around its metal ribs on the way to the surface, a murky, greasy, billowing black cloud, seeking to stomp on all sea life.

But Jonathan has left the screen, and the focus is now on a petty political spat. I shut down the telly with the remote and sit for a moment, reluctant to head back to the box room. I feel curiously jet-lagged, as if I’m not quite in step with the world. Or perhaps it’s that I’m not quite in time with the house. It hasn’t escaped me that I continue to feel like I’m being watched. Or maybe observed is a better word: I feel like I am being analyzed. Which is wholly ridiculous. Clearly I need to eat.

As I’m trying to understand the hob in the kitchen with a view to making some soup, my phone rings: Jonathan. I feel something in me unwind as his name flashes on my BlackBerry screen. “Hey, you, I’ve just been watching you,” I say lightly.

“How was I?” There’s a smile in his voice, but exhaustion too.