It was dark, but he could still go on a run, Lucas reasoned. He was dressed for it and exercise helped him think. Maybe he could do a route to Heidi’s flat. He closed his eyes, trying to breathe, to keep the panic at bay. Somehow, sleep came, a thin restless state of half-waking. When he blinked the room back into focus, it was the corner shop rather than Heidi’s flat that presented itself as an option. He had been resisting. For Heidi, the flat – his life – had become a drink-free zone, but what did that matter now?

One more call, Lucas decided. A final roll of the dice. He picked up his mobile, only to find the screen black from lack of power. Hope coursed through him. He loped into the bedroom for his charger and plugged the phone in with shaky fingers. During the moments of waiting he prayed to the God he had told Heidi did not exist. There were two new notifications, but only from Esther: one a missed call, the other asking for a group chat with Lily the following day.

The corner shop, then. Lucas thrust his overcoat on over his running clothes and put on the old grey beanie that Heidi hated, because it washed his skin out, she said, and smothered his beautiful hair. She had a thing for his hair, raking her fingers through it, tugging at it, when they made love. Lucas moved in slow motion, concussed, it felt like. So much so, that he almost forgot his house keys. Arriving at the top of the main stairs, he paused, looking down, wishing they were steeper, longer and made of concrete, not wood. There would have been a chance then, of doing a thorough job. A memory of his mother fluttered, a rag doll dangling from the apple tree. Iris had been the one to find her. An insult added to an injury so extreme that Lucas still found it the hardest thing of all to contemplate. The mistress finding the dead wife.

He was three stairs down when a faint clicking noise and a sudden uprush of icy air told him the main door had been opened. The sound of footsteps followed. Lucas’s heart galloped. She had come back. He would say he believed in God. He would agree Moira was a victim. He would say any damn thing. But it was the top of a thick head of blonde hair that appeared round the curve in the stairwell. Dylan, he thought, trying and failing to say his son’s name before the realisation that it was Lily.