And then a sudden acceptance washed over me. Every story has an end. I have been through many transits and there is a calm one feels at the heart of time. Beyond the noise of the real, in the moment between worlds, there is peace. I held on to that. The stillness beyond suffering and desire. I was fifty-three and Harri was forty-two. Unlike Mum, Harri would live a full and natural life and that would have to be enough.

We might only have thirty or so years together, but I was determined they would be happy ones. I tore the page off the notepad, scrunched it up and put it in the bedside cabinet.

She poked her head round the door.

‘Everything OK?’ she asked.

I couldn’t help but be cheered by her smiling face.

‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘Everything’s fine.’

I was determined to make every second count.

‘You coming in with me?’ she asked.

I nodded and followed her into the shower.

We made the most of our time together, growing old in that house, laughing, living a simple life as the world passed us by, but that was the day I knew my part in the story wasn’t over.

Many years later, I bought the book from the library after Mum had borrowed it. I wrote the inscription in the book the day Harri and I met in the bookshop.

The day I told her about her own death.

I could hardly speak when I first saw her. She was a living reminder of brighter days, of a past when we had been young together. I had wanted so much to reach out and touch her, to hold her close, but I was an old stranger to her, not the man she loved in another time.

I could tell she was humouring an old, grieving man, but being with her was a blessing after having experienced the trauma of her death.

I hope you find this letter. If you do, I’m sure it will be strange for you to read these words, to know your son grieved for a wife he would meet again, but that is my life, a broken journey through time with nothing where it should be.

It turns out I’d lied to her without knowing it that day. It was me who videoed the fight with Alan Munro and his death. I went there that night, as a shuffling old man, just to see her, because it was one of the few times I knew exactly where she would be, and I wanted to be near her. When I realized I was the only one on the railway bridge, I filmed the altercation, an old man watching his wife in her prime, capturing the evidence that would prove her innocence.

I delivered it to her flat the day after my younger self was sentenced, exactly when she’d told me it had been delivered the day she came to visit me in prison. I slid the envelope under the door, knowing she was inside. The woman I loved. The woman I’d grown old with. I leaned against the door and listened while I caught my breath. Even the slightest sound would have been something to take with me, but there was just silence, so after a while I shuffled on.