I see only the fleeting shadow of it.

XIX

Simone grows increasingly restless throughout the final days of winter. She is keen for the frost to recede, for spring to arrive so that she may venture outside. Each morning she takes her coffee and edges a little further into the garden, as if she is trying to ward off the cold. Like a child chasing waves up and down the shoreline, it becomes a sort of ritual.

She spends her time planting tomatoes and peppers in the kitchen. It is a surprisingly delicate process. She sows the seeds into specialised pots, filling them with a sterilised soil mixture to facilitate growth before placing the trays beneath grow lights and labelling each diligently. There are disease-resistant strains, determinate and indeterminate varieties, all manner of fertiliser compounds.

We seldom speak. It seems the longer we are together the less our conversations require words at all. Her body speaks to me in its proximity. I am uniquely attuned to it. I read her objections out of the air. I try to take comfort in old adages. I tell myself that she needs time, that her work in the garden will be a welcome return to normalcy. That this will all soon pass.

She had always been prone to fits of isolation. Before the accident I would return often to find her waiting for me on the stairs, her body perched as if over some invisible edge. Desperate for either adult conversation or simply a break from tending to the needs of a toddler. When he had been particularly impetuous she would hand over the baton like a relay runner, without speaking a word, and disappear upstairs to lie prostrate on the cool of our bed until it was time to bathe him.

‘I must have picked these things up a hundred times today,’ she said one evening as we crawled on all fours across the playroom floor. ‘I feel like Sisyphus.’

‘Find me a rock that looks as cute as he does in a pair of dungarees.’

‘I’m serious,’ she said.

‘He’s a child.’

‘Very observant,’ she said, sitting up and pressing her palms against her eyelids. She sighed. ‘I get to the end of days like this and I think what have I accomplished?’

‘You’re doing an incredible job.’

‘It doesn’t feel like progress.’

‘You don’t see him the way I do. You’re too close to it. I leave early for work. Sometimes I’m home after bedtime. I’ll go two or three days without any time with him and then on the weekends the change is incredible. It’s like passing a construction site every morning. It’s this skeleton of timber for months and months and then one day you drive by and there’s just this beautiful, pristine building. You sit in the shadow of it and you think: where did this come from?’

‘I know,’ she said, biting the skin round her nails, tearing it off in thin strips, her voice distant. ‘I know.’