Derry’s face swims up to him. She looks so concerned, and her question stalls the gears of his mind, which churn on an endless loop. He found the note. Just one word in Aurelia’s handwriting, left on his bedside table.

Sorry

Had his wife not been missing for thirty-nine hours this note would have had little meaning. He’d assume she was sorry for spilling tea on a contract or shrinking one of his jumpers in the wash. And then he’d give her a kiss and get on with things.

Thirty-nine hours.

It has started to snow.

The police come. They take statements in clipped, cold English phrases, regard him with curiosity and suspicion. They put on plastic gloves and trawl through Aurelia’s clothes, the house. He paces. Coco won’t stop screaming. Gaia falls mute. She won’t speak, won’t eat.

Mumma ran away.

Sixty-seven hours. The phone rings. He dives for it.

‘Aurelia?’

Not Aurelia. His stomach drops. It’s the police.

We’ve found a body part.

She is buried in Highgate Cemetery in London, with its hideous Gothic architecture and overbearing whiff of old money. Aurelia’s parents have demanded that she is interred in the family plot, and he has no energy to fight them, Gothic architecture notwithstanding. It’s a punishment on their part for whatever role they believe he played in her death. But he saw her corpse, is still traumatized by what death can do … So fine, bury her here, he thinks. Bury her wherever you like. The body he identified was not his wife. It was meat, destruction, death. Not Aurelia. A carcass. He will not commemorate her here.

He returns to the house at Hampstead. The agony of its endless empty rooms. The children crying day and night for their mother. Concerned relatives, mostly female, fussing over him, bringing meals. One of them hires a nanny. Ellen. He almost turns her away, then thinks better of it. She seems capable, and he is not able to give these children what they need right now. He can barely function. The world without Aurelia is absurd beyond all credulity. Grief is not a mere feeling – it’s an isotropic space. He can’t fathom living without her, that she is nowhere. Nowhere.

And one night, when he is astonishingly drunk, he comes across the sketch he drew of the new house. He’s written ‘Aurelia’s Nest’ at the bottom.