‘Look, will you?’ she said, not gently.

I looked.

The final message on Bob the Butcher’s timeline.

There was no picture of Robert Oppenheimer.

There was no mushroom cloud.

In their place was a small black-and-white photograph. At first sight it looked like nothing – an abstract little squiggle of broken planes. But when I looked closer I saw that it was a city. It was an entire city, destroyed in an instant. My eye flicked across the hashtag, like a command to his one million followers.

#killallpigs

And then I read the message, and I did not understand, so I read it again, the rhythm of the numbers and words so familiar to me that at first I thought they were not on the screen but only in my head.

‘Isn’t that your home address?’ Wren said.

I was gone.

They were coming back from school. Scout and Mrs Murphy and Stan. My daughter and Mrs Murphy looking down at the dog and laughing. Stan trotting happily by their side. Something in his mouth. A scrap of bagel. The smiles vanishing when they saw me.

‘What’s wrong?’ Mrs Murphy said.

‘We have to go,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’

I got Scout and Stan into the back of the X5, told Scout to put her seat belt on, and then I drove, pushing down hard, just ahead of the evening rush, Mrs Murphy standing on the street in my rear-view mirror, watching us go.

‘But where are we going?’ Scout said as we crossed Waterloo Bridge.

‘We’re going to see your mother,’ I said.

She was standing on the lawn of a house on a road in a part of town where you could believe that nothing bad ever happened.

There was a small toddler crawling at her feet and a baby growing inside her.

Not my children. From her new man.

Anne.

It is such an ordinary, old-fashioned English name and I do not think I will ever be able to hear it without it pulling at my heart.

Anne, Anne, Anne.

You might not believe it – I could hardly believe it myself – but there had been a world, not so long ago, when we were as close to each other as we had been to anyone we had ever known in our young lives. When we laughed all the time; when a good life together was before us; when every night we lit a candle in the corner of our bedroom because we were unable to sleep, because it would have meant a kind of parting for a few hours. And now all that was gone; now that is all over, she told me, with one small stroke of the belly that was round with another man’s child.

Anne, I thought. And looking at her now on the lawn, happy in this new place without me, I was shocked by something that I could not admit was the remains of our love.