I unlock and slide open the doors to the garden and step outside. The spring sunshine warms my face. Leaf buds, still tightly wrapped, nobble the branches of the trees; the grass needs its first cut. I turn and look up at the house. It’s always seemed so solid, but now I imagine it falling apart, bricks and glass cascading down. He’s only been gone a day and a half, and already I’m feeling a chill. It’s as though I foolishly assumed that the winter was over, and an overnight frost has attacked the green shoots.

At five, I call Nick’s office and tell a few more whoppers. I warn Phillipa not to expect him before Thursday, saying that he’s too sick to come to the phone. I lie and lie and lie. When she asks if he’s getting his emails, I say no. He hasn’t been able to get out of bed. He vomits everything up. He has diarrhoea.

‘Surely he should be in hospital,’ she says. ‘He must be terribly dehydrated.’

‘The doctor’s coming to do an assessment this evening. They don’t want him to come to the surgery, in case it’s Norovirus.’

There’s a long pause. Phillipa coughs. I wait, my hand gripping the phone, sweating against the plastic.

‘All right,’ she says slowly. ‘I’ll call in the morning. Grace, is everything OK?’

‘I’ve spent the past twenty-four hours cleaning up sick, but otherwise everything’s fine and dandy, thank you.’ Too glib, I think, wincing. ‘Sorry, it’s been a little stressful here.’

‘I can imagine. Well, give him my love and tell him we’re coping fine and he’s not to worry. Focus on getting better. If we have any problems Lewis will phone him. Hopefully he’ll be able to take a call, at least.’

NICK

July 2000

HE KNOWS IT ISN’T REAL BUT, EVEN SO, HE’S TERRIFIED, pinned to the bed by sleep paralysis while snake-headed demons swoop at him from the picture hanging on the wall. It’s an oil painting of an elderly woman with a bonnet and the purple weeds of a Victorian widow. In his bedroom at home he doesn’t have anything on the walls, no posters or photos. He took them down after the nightmares started.

Nick shuts his eyes tight and imagines his limbs moving, concentrates so hard that it feels as though his mind might burst. His foot twitches first, and with that the demons vanish, and relief floods him. Then he can move his arms, his torso, his legs. He shakes his feet under the sheet, opens and closes his fists, twists his neck from side to side and relaxes back with a sigh.