When she had opened her fingers there was a silver swallow in her hand, set with paste stones and a ruby eye. Somebody else’s fingerprints were tarnished into the metal, and there was something about that glittering red eye that she didn’t like. She had nodded and thanked him, but she can’t recall that she has ever worn the brooch. Was that a mistake? Did he see that she didn’t like it? Was that where it all went wrong?

She remembers that last week with Francis strangely, almost as if it is not her own life that she is recalling, but a story that she once read, or a play that she’s seen. It feels secondhand, as if during those days she hadn’t been living at the surface. The images that she brings to mind now aren’t quite in focus and she can’t remember all of the words. What she recalls most clearly about that week is the tension, and when she forces her mind back there, she can feel it again.

It wasn’t that she had expected it to be easy. After all, it had been more than two years, and she already knew from the voice in his letters, or rather the lack of voice, that something wasn’t right. She wasn’t fool enough to have imagined things would be like they had been before, that they would instantly fall back into laughter and easy intimacy, but she had at least expected that they would be close together. And, as she had prepared for his visit, she had wanted to be close to him; to wash his skin and ease his aches, to soothe him and care for him, to show him that he was loved, and that he had all of this to come back to. She had also wanted him to talk to her. To tell her what was troubling him. To share. To unburden himself. Did it all go wrong because she didn’t ask the right questions? Or was it that first awkward touch on the doorstep that spoiled everything that came after?

The platform clock ticks. Its gilt hands move around the Roman numerals too fast. It was not Francis’s fault that there was dirt down his fingernails, she told herself, and that he hadn’t washed his hair all week, but she had found herself not wanting to be close to him. Every room in the house smelled of him, a sweet-sour smell that his skin had never had before, and she had to lean out of the windows to breathe. She was glad that he didn’t try to touch her after that first difficult moment. She can’t recall that she touched him. When she lay at this stranger’s side, she couldn’t sleep and the hands on the bedroom clock had moved so terribly slowly.