“You will,” he’d tell her, pulling her into his arms, kissing the top of her head. “I believe in you.”

“I don’t say this enough, but you really are the best husband.”

That made it all better: the arguments and the pain. The tenderness, the love, that was their marriage. Not the rest of it.

Other than the sex, Scott couldn’t think of any indicators. He’d taken Natalie’s detached nature as a symptom of her busy imagination. But truthfully she was somewhere else in her mind, with her lover, pretending Scott didn’t exist.

He tilted his head from side to side, working out some of the tension in his neck. He wanted to hate Natalie. But he couldn’t. Any time rage rose up, it was quickly followed by a vignette of how she’d looked in death, with her skin seeming somehow colourless, her eyes vacant, her stare full of nothing.

Scott wondered what had triggered the suicide. It clearly had something to do with her lover. She was thinking of her in the final moments: her, not Scott, not her parents.

Scott’s bladder gave another pulse. He was trying to fight it. If one of his students whined they needed to the toilet on a school trip, he’d tell them to cross their legs and wait. Now he realised what a dick move that was.

He hoped Lauren had something for him soon. The teaching assistant was hard-working and had great attention to detail. People generally liked her. She’d be able to ingratiate herself into the book club, get the information Scott needed. If there was any information to be had.

All of this – investigating Natalie’s suicide, digging into Casey’s past – it could lead nowhere. It was all blind hope. It was all faith. He needed it.

More time passed. Scott’s body tried to drag him down to sleep, but his need to piss jolted him awake each time. Dark and light, waking and sleeping, and then he woke with tears streaming hotly down his cheeks. He must’ve been dreaming, though he couldn’t remember it.

Urine flooded his underwear, seeping down his thighs, pooling beneath him. It spread around the cage. He reeked. He buried his face in his hands, unable to stop, wishing this would end: wishing he had a way out that wouldn’t blow his life up.

He wanted Natalie, his Nat, wanted her to hold him the same way she had after his father died. She’d embraced him so tightly, her fingers sinking into his back, so hard it was almost painful. But he didn’t care. She was there; she was never going to leave him. Everything else had faded; he forgot they’d ever behaved cruelly to each other. There was only love.

“It’s all going to be okay,” he imagined her saying. “Just hold on a little longer.”

He finally stopped pissing. Shifting to the other side of the cage – not that it was big enough to have much of another side – he moved as far away from the puddle of urine as he could. His boxers were soaked. He knew he should try to take them off, but standing was impossible. If he straightened his legs and shimmied out of his trousers, he’d end up spreading the piss everywhere.