Copies of the photograph, including the one she was looking at, were delivered to her just after the worst had happened, adding to her childish sorrow over parting with the puppy. Having dodged it so many times, the lightning bolt of extreme renunciation had finally struck and was now suffocating her. After that final elusive squeeze of her hand (‘You’re a clever girl, you’ll get married’), he had turned his back on her, walked among the crowd, retreated into the distance. She felt she couldn’t move, but somehow did, heading very slowly in the opposite direction. Finally, shattered to pieces, she sobbed openly in the streets, shamelessly, eventually entering a church gauchely lit with Christmas candles. In a merciful corner there, she realized to her horror that twenty-three years were few, that many still needed to pass for her to arrive at the end of an average human life – the life that she must live, alone, with dignity and courage, her only redemption. She didn’t pray for death, but prayed, for pity’s sake, that the time she had left would pass swiftly.

She gradually learned how to ride the waves of her days, as if she had a chronic, but not fatal, illness, her lack of confidence conditioning her thoughts, her studies, her work. Now and again, she would look at the photograph, and one day she made a discovery: indeed, that melancholic damsel really was a beautiful young woman. But this wasn’t the issue; that image actually represented the quintessentially eternal ‘Miss’ – a substitute teacher, later a proper teacher, but always defined by that diminutive label that straddled pathetic and charming, and as she grew older, was even a little ridiculous. Even now, she stubbornly clung to this label – devoid of a first and last name – that society had branded her with. Her memories, secretly stored away (and woe to that sentimental colleague who mentioned them), kept her in a state of permanent adolescence.