Simone waits for me beneath the eaves of the house. As I approach she turns to greet me and at the sight of her face I feel a great exhaustion wash over me. The muscles in my legs suddenly weak. The pain so intense that for a moment I fear I won’t be able to get out of the car. But when she nods her head and beckons for me to join her I know that she understands. That she is aware of my apprehension, my reservations about the undertaking.

We stand before the house’s imposing red door. I lift its metal knocker, a brass lion, and am surprised by the weight of it in my hand. I crane my head upwards, expecting to find a portcullis, some piece of arcane medieval apparatus high above us, but I see only wooden beams.

The therapist escorts us through the property in silence. We are ushered into a room and sit beneath a crude landscape painting of the sea. I watch snow fall through the property’s arched windows. It is unending. I imagine it piling up round the house, covering the windows and blocking the doors, rising to the roof and further still to cover the chimney until we disappear completely. I can feel winter’s cold hands against the house, resting on window ledges and pressing into doors, trying desperately to work its way inside.

‘Shall we get started?’ the therapist asks finally and I feel my body tense.

On the carpet a lazy square of sunlight stretches itself across the room in the way a cat might. I use it to keep track of time.

Simone sits, hands folded in her lap, and she weeps.

She cries his name so much it begins to sound foreign.

A broken, useless thing. And it is.

The dead have no use for names.

After the session I throw the journal the therapist has given us onto a heap of snow and sit inside the stifling cold of my car. Simone raps on the driver’s side window with her knuckle. When I wind it down she brushes dirt from the cover of the notebook and kneels to look me in the eye.

‘We have to at least try,’ she says.

‘Did you try, Simone?’ I ask and regret it immediately.

She stands and though I cannot see her face I know that she is holding back tears. Her body shakes and rattles with the effort. I contemplate getting out of the car and comforting her, but instead find myself putting it in reverse.

I leave her standing alone in the snow, my breath forming clouds as I descend the gravel path. I don’t need to look for her in the rear-view mirror to know what I’ll see. Head hung, hands clasped over mouth. Face pale, eyes sunken. The same listless and forlorn expression. A ghost.

That night she writhes and thrashes in her sleep, sweat dampening the sheets round her like a halo. She calls out to him and weeps, her hands held high above her as if reaching for some imagined and unreachable landmark.