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Every few months I open the en-suite’s mirror cabinet and inventory the medicines we keep there. The collection seems to grow each year. There had been a time when all I seemed to need was antiperspirant and toothpaste. Now the cabinet overflows with eczema creams and nasal sprays. There are heat packs and muscle balms stacked in uneven piles, all manner of decongestants and heartburn tablets. A litany of migraine medications.

On the lowest shelf are Phineas’s old medicines. Bottles of dinosaur-shaped vitamins, plastic syringes, liquid paracetamol, tubes of antiseptic ointments. I lift each and quietly drop them into the trash can at my feet. The act feels illicit, a subtle betrayal, and I go about my work quietly, praying that Simone won’t hear me.

At the back of the cabinet, hidden in a floral bag, I find a pill bottle. I pick it up and turn it over in my hand. Simone’s initials are printed across the label and beneath it, in block capitals, is the name of a drug I don’t recognise. When I type it into my phone the results suggest they are a sleep aid, but in all the time I’ve known her she’s never struggled with insomnia.

When I hear her stirring in the bedroom I return the bottle to its hiding place and turn off the lights. I stare at her from the doorway. I consider mentioning the discovery but decide against it.

‘You’re still reading that?’ I ask as I lift the covers and slide in beside her.

She turns the book over in her hand and studies the cover. ‘I can’t seem to finish it. I read a page but nothing sticks. I try to focus on a paragraph. A sentence. But I can’t make any progress.’

‘Why not start something new?’

‘It would feel too much like breaking a promise,’ she says.

When I look at her face it seems wrong, somehow, as if the discovery of the pill bottle has altered my perception of her. I turn my bedside lamp off and watch as she does the same. We lie together in the darkness. I think about the pills. How long had she been taking them? Why would she feel the need to hide them?

I find myself unusually conscious of her presence, as if I am sleeping next to a stranger. I feel the heat of her body but it brings me little comfort. There had been a time when I considered us fundamentally the same person, but lately I feel a chasm opening between us. I consider for a moment the disquieting notion that a life need not be actively abandoned or dismantled, but simply observed with growing distance until one day it is no longer your own.

‘Do you remember the week we brought him home?’ she asks suddenly.

She rolls to face me and I can see her eyes in the darkness. They reflect a light that doesn’t exist. The flickering embers of a campfire in some imagined distance.