Ewan, on duty in the porter’s lodge, gave him a cheery wave as he passed by, calling out how cold it had turned.

‘Freezing,’ Lucas agreed, hurrying across the courtyard to his staircase and wondering, as the hollowness inside his stomach increased, whether there might be any biscuits left in the tin he kept for students. As it turned out, there weren’t, and the air in his room had the stale coldness of an empty fridge. He turned up the radiator, which gurgled discouragingly, and wrapped his scarf more tightly round his neck before sitting down at his desk. The idea of settling to any work had already crumbled. Instead, he spent some time composing a message of thanks to Ralph, apologising if he had seemed negative and assuring him that he recognised the welfare of Moira as being paramount. Ralph was key now. He needed to keep him onside.

When his phone lit up with a video call from Heidi, Lucas threw himself onto the sofa to take it, propping a cushion behind his head. ‘Liebchen, what a lovely surprise, I thought we agreed tomorrow. I’ve just had a drink with Ralph – it’s looking like mediation, which is a pain, but he will navigate us through, I am sure of it… Heidi? Are you okay…?’

‘No, Lucas, I am not okay. I am terrible. I…’

The cushion tumbled to the floor as Lucas sat up, properly taking in his fiancée’s ashen face and the red rims of her eyes. ‘Are you sick?’ A cold dread was already squeezing his heart. A dread that caused him to talk on, like a madman, about whether she was unwell, and, if so, all she needed were rest and analgesics. His brain whirred as he jabbered, while Heidi shook her head and tried to get on top of her tears. Lucas became aware of the big central window, just a couple of feet from the end of the sofa. He could fling himself out of it in seconds. Two storeys up – a thirty-foot drop onto the old stone slabs below – it would do the job. The image, so visually clear, brought a small point of calm deep inside the fear.

When Heidi, in a halting, wretched voice, mastered her emotions sufficiently to confess that she had managed to lose her precious engagement ring, Lucas could have wept with relief.

‘On a walk… with my grandparents… I threw a stick for the dogs, and somehow it flew off. We looked and we looked…’

‘It’s only a ring. We can get another,’ Lucas cried joyfully, even as he remembered that the ring hadn’t been insured. It had cost three thousand, seven hundred pounds. But who cared, he decided wildly, if the heart of its erstwhile owner was still his?