I hear the plumber’s voice ring out in my mind. You had a leak here at one point.

I close my eyes and find myself at the foot of the stairs. I climb forever, treading water. The carpets sodden. The wallpaper pockmarked and peeling from water damage. I follow the sound of running water to the master bathroom. It spills out from beneath the crack of the door.

How long had it been running?

‘I called out to her but she wouldn’t answer,’ I say. ‘So I started hammering on the door. Begging. Pleading. Please, Simone. Please, no.’

I drove my shoulder into the door repeatedly. Over and over and over again. I can still hear the sound of my footsteps falling heavy against the hardwood flooring like distant thunder. Until finally it came loose with a sickening crack.

I think of the hairline fracture in the doorway of the master bathroom.

The fresh screws affixing the hinges.

‘I found her in the bathtub,’ I weep, swallowing panicked breaths. ‘They said she must have been there for days.’

Her head bloated as if from some horrific allergy.

The whites of her eyes shot red and inflamed beneath the water.

At the coroner’s inquest they reconstructed her final hours with a precision that felt slanderous, the pathologist reducing her life to a series of line items. She left no note. No explanation. But her purpose seemed self-evident. She had drawn a bath and taken pills. She had waited patiently for them to take her away, for her body to slip beneath the surface of the water so that she could finally be with him. It was only when the dosage proved ineffective that she made a deep incision along her inner thigh. A violent act. One final, misguided punishment.

I remember being surprised by how clear the water had been when I found her. My horror when I looked closer and realised that parts of her had settled at the bottom of the bathtub as a sort of black sediment. It was the darkest colour I had ever seen. Not a colour at all but rather a total absence of light.

They were both there now, beneath the black water. She had gone to find him. Her arms outstretched. Her fingers straining to hold him one last time.

I remember the ambulance arriving in the street.

I remember men in uniforms storming up the driveway.

I remember them carrying her out in a bag.

And that night in my dreams I remember standing at the edge of a lake. The water black, but unbroken. Reflective as if made out of polished glass. A perfect mirror.

From the shoreline I watched as birds dove from trees and careened along, their wingtips mere inches from the surface. I felt a great anxiety watching them, as if piercing the water would somehow amount to a terrible disaster. A great flood, perhaps. Or a famine. Something biblical.

So I resolved to sit at the water’s edge like a guardian, to ward off any evildoers. To dance and shout and holler when any such attempt was made. But as I waited I felt myself drawn closer and closer to the edge. Until I was close enough to crane my neck and see my own reflection.