Silva put on her jacket and reached for her helmet. She was cross at Sean for misleading her about the evening and angry with herself for allowing her guard to drop. ‘For the rest of my life, Sean, that’s what.’

‘I don’t…’ Sean paused before raising a hand and making a dismissive gesture. ‘Aw fuck it. Do what you want. I’m beyond caring any more.’

Silva nodded and headed towards the door. She clicked it open and stood for a moment. ‘That’s what I thought.’

She arrived home in the early hours and spent a good chunk of Tuesday asleep in her bunk. She tried not to think about Karen Hope and Matthew Fairchild and Neil Milligan and Sean. Tried not to think about her mother. On Wednesday she returned to work and walked the streets. Pushed letters through flaps. Nodded to colleagues in the sorting office at the end of her round. Hung up her bag and went home and fed herself and lay on her bunk and read until she fell asleep.

The next day she woke thinking this was it. Stuck on an endless wash cycle: soak, rinse, spin, repeat. Soak, rinse, spin, repeat. She remembered her mother’s exhortation in Tunisia: At some point you have to move on. There was sense in what she’d said, but it was almost as if her death prevented the very thing she’d told Silva to do. She doubted anybody else could understand, not even Itchy. He seemed to have escaped the worst of the psychological trauma of what happened in Afghanistan. Was that because his life was moving on? He had a girlfriend, a baby on the way, something to look forward to. What did Silva have? Perhaps it went deeper than that though. Itchy was happy-go-lucky, fatalistic. Things always worked out all right in the end; for Silva, raised by two headstrong parents who believed in their own ability to make a difference in the world, the powerlessness she’d experienced after Afghanistan had been debilitating. And now, with her mother dead, the feeling was almost overwhelming.

She went off to work, collected the mail for the round and filled her postbag. She was keen to get moving, keen to stop thinking. Halfway through her shift she was shoving a bunch of mail into the letterbox of a little terraced house when she noticed the front door wasn’t quite closed. Whatever, she thought. Not her problem. But as she turned to go she remembered the old woman who lived there. She walked with a frame and always had a smile for Silva. Once, a cup of tea and a chocolate biscuit had appeared. ‘Because, you know, you look like you could do with something sweet in your life,’ the woman had said.