‘Good. I miss you,’ I said, looking around, at the pictures on the wall. I’d seen them all dozens of times but now I studied them. A wall of photographs, of musicians on a stage under pink lights and pristine beaches and over-saturated sunsets and rainbow-coloured graffiti, of the Paris skyline. Framed postcards from Rio and San Francisco and Iceland that had made my breath catch the first time I saw them and still did. ‘I’ve used up all your hot water and finished off your coffee and now I’m going to eat some of your food and watch your television and then I’ll go, okay?’

‘You don’t have to go.’

I headed across to the bookcase, past two guitars on stands—one acoustic and one electric, black and white and shiny, but obviously well used. I wanted to crawl inside his brain, live in it and see all this through his eyes.

‘I don’t?’

I loved the bookcase, overstuffed with piles of books in no order; ancient sci-fi paperbacks that I knew he’d started reading as a kid in between more recent bestsellers and serious, heavy classics; Shakespeare and Umberto Eco and Stephen King and Isaac Asimov and Roald Dahl and Kurt Vonnegut and Nick Hornby. A pile of comics and choose-your-own-adventure books and then Jane Austen and Tom Stoppard and a small cluster of poetry anthologies and Bill Bryson and Hunter S. Thompson and books about maths and the universe and television shows, a stack of science magazines.

‘Of course you don’t. I’ll be home after eight. Use up as much hot water as you like. I think you’ll find it doesn’t run out.’

I smiled.

‘Unless you’ve got things to do. Or you can go and come back. You’ve got keys.’

Again I wished he was there, so much. ‘Are you sure you trust me here, all by myself?’

‘I trust you, Cait.’ I heard him move, a chair leg scrape on lino. ‘I have to get back to it, though. I’ll see you later?’

I touched an atlas at the end of one shelf. Thick and well worn, the kind of atlas he would have been given as a child and never looked at anymore but would never throw away. Or maybe I was making that up.

‘I’ll be here.’

‘I’m glad.’ He hesitated. ‘Bye, Caitlin.’

‘Bye, Tom.’