I was furious at what I perceived as Simone’s weakness. Her refusal to acknowledge the reality of our situation. It surprised me how much value I placed in her ability to persevere, in her strength. How attractive I found it, and how disgusted I’d been by its disappearance. How furious it made me. I hated Phineas for what he had reduced her to.

‘You once asked me what made a person a person,’ I say. ‘Simone refused to eat. She lost so much weight she was barely there at all. She said he had carried her heart away. That closing her eyes was the only way she could see him again. In dreams.’

The car stalks forward like a predatory animal and I am more alone than I have ever been. I think of the missing, the unending disappeared, their bodies broken down to the bare extremity of existence. The machinery of sense and memory.

XL

We climb the mountain but the mountain does not end. The cape of night hangs over us, but there are no stars. They are elsewhere tonight.

‘I can’t do this,’ I say.

There isn’t an ounce of energy left in my body. I feel as though my feet are sinking through the floor.

‘You’re free to leave at any time,’ the therapist says and she looks briefly surprised when I open the driver’s side door and roll myself out of the car, landing on the asphalt and pulling myself up weakly.

I watch the headlights of the car disappear into the darkness and for a moment I enjoy the silence. I imagine the therapist sitting calmly in the back seat as the car teeters over the edge of the mountain and then plummets, crashing to the ground and erupting in a plume of smoke and fire. But then the headlights catch me from behind, illuminating the silhouette of my body, and the car pulls up beside me once again.

‘You of all people should know it’s possible to leave without truly leaving,’ the therapist says as I slide back into the driver’s seat. The car pushes forward again undeterred, casting us into darkness.

‘What do you want from me?’ I ask.

‘I want you to tell me why you decided to go home,’ she says.

‘I missed Simone,’ I say. ‘I didn’t want to be without her.’

That’s the partial truth.

The reality is that I knew I could exist without her.

But as what?

As whom?

‘So you went home? You made reparations?’

‘Yes,’ I say. We took it a day at a time. We agreed to visit a therapist.

‘It’s a nice story,’ the therapist says. ‘But it’s not the truth.’

I begin to feel as though I’ve fallen down a staircase in my mind. I see the bouquets dug out of the compost bin, laid out in a neat row at the foot of the garden. Each bound by beautiful lilac ribbon – the way she kept her hair.

‘You heard running water,’ she says. ‘When you got home you thought a pipe had burst. It was coming from the hall landing.’