A male tawny owl hoots in the woods behind the towpath. Jake gets up from his desk and walks out into the cockpit. The sky is scattered with stars, partly hidden by clouds. Is Kate looking at the same sky tonight? They used to lie on their backs in the summer, on top of the boat, making plans and dreams as they spotted the Space Station circling the earth. Two children, a country cottage with her artist’s studio in the garden, the boat kept as his writer’s retreat. It never quite worked out like that.

A sound further down the canal. Metallic. Unusual. It’s hard to see anything in the dying light. A figure crosses the bridge by the lock gates. Someone returning from the pub, perhaps. A late dog walker. He thinks of the barman he saw today, the way he threatened him. Either he was lying and knew about Kate, or there’s something else going on at the pub that they don’t want journalists to discover. It had a strange vibe. All those CCTV cameras.

Back inside the boat, Jake reopens his laptop. The beginning of a chapter stares back at him. He doesn’t know why he bothers to turn a good sentence these days, or agonise over an alliteration. It all gets lost in translation. Learning Finnish might be easier. Save everyone a lot of time.

He hears another noise, closer now. Muscles tensing, he steps back out to the cockpit, stands on the seat and peers into the darkness. He’s just imagining things. It’s happened a lot recently. The boat feels so empty without Kate. Sometimes he talks to her when he’s writing, as if she were in the galley. Snippets of dialogue, passages of descriptive writing. His account of what she saw that night on the CCTV. She’s never given him a chance to explain.

Below deck again, he calls up a photo of Rob, Kate’s new partner, trying to ignore a tightness in his chest. There are always noises on the canal at night. He holds his fingers out above the keyboard. They’re shaking. He dislikes Rob with a passion and hates himself for it. A better person than him would get on well with his successor. A man who has brought happiness to the woman he still loves, happiness that he was singularly unable to provide. He should be pleased for her. There are enough sickening reasons to like the guy – the tech fortune and his love of art, the unique blend of geekiness and entrepreneurism, his random acts of bloody philanthropy. Jake knows he ought to accept them all with equanimity, but he’s consumed with a jealousy so intense that it frightens him.

More noise outside. This time he forces himself to sit still and listen, straining his ears. Silence, only broken by a return hoot from a female tawny owl, further away. His own breathing has become shallower.