He carried on through the house, walking in and out of the rooms, touching her towels in the bathroom; sitting a while in a chair where he found a newspaper with the crossword half done. He looked at the clues she’d filled in, the way her capitals strayed out of the squares. He’d never seen her handwriting before. There was so much they hadn’t done together.

His head roared with whisky. It took a lot of whisky these days to stop the shakes, to blunt the pain and regret. He longed to be blind drunk. To be oblivious. He’d strayed onto vodka, just once or twice in the mornings before work. There was no pleasure in it, but that wasn’t the point any more. He felt his dad in him when he drank from the bottle and hid it behind the plumbing in the cupboard under the sink. There was nobody in the house to find the bottle but it was in his blood to do it this way, to become a furtive, careful, practised liar; an addict. He had fought it all his life and it had been futile.

In the bedroom he found it harder to forget she was gone. The lack of her was everywhere. He took his shoes off and lay down on the bed, lifting her pillow to his face. On the first inhale he caught the faintest hint of her, the clean smell of the vanilla soap she used. His hands closed around the pillow and he gripped it hard, pulled it close to his face and let out a painful, strangled yelp, the closest he could get to crying for her. All he’d wanted was to put things right, to make up for his mistakes and win her back.

He climbed under the sheets. When he woke the light had changed, the room was full of shadows. He stood and straightened the bedding, plumped the pillows. He pulled a blouse out of the wardrobe but it was too clean; it held the smell of the iron but nothing else. He picked up a hairbrush from her dresser; took the lid off of a lipstick and rubbed its brownish colour against his wrist. From a drawer he took a pink scarf, the one she wore in her hair sometimes. He wrapped it around his hand. It was exquisitely painful, the thought of her with her hair pushed back from her face, looking up at him.

He put the scarf back in the drawer. No mementoes. Louisa would be back any day and he was going to have to stop this. He couldn’t divorce her, not now. He’d have to try to be the husband she wanted him to be. Some days he thought he could do it. He thought he might take comfort in her loving him. And by trying to love her back, maybe he could atone for all of this. Other days, he thought spending the rest of his life with the wrong woman might kill him.