He removed the empty boxes to the kitchen and came back with my long-lost phone.

“Here.” He pressed it nervously into my hands. “Your phone. You’ll be pleased to know I found it . . .”

I stared, speechless.

“. . . and I thought it was about time you had it back.”

My eyes moved from his face to the phone.

“Cory . . .” His name wedged like a hard object in my throat. “When . . . ?”

It was going to be the first of several questions, but he batted it aside.

“Does it matter?”

I kept on staring like the idiot I was—down at the phone, up at his face, down at the phone. Well, did it matter? When I considered what else Cory Byrne had done—when I considered Stella—did it matter if he’d stolen my mobile?

“Sorry,” he said softly. “It’s entirely my fault. I should have known I could trust you.”

I went upstairs alone, to change out of the white dress. It was barely two hours since I’d chucked my normal clothes on the floor of Diana’s bedroom, but already they felt dank. I crouched behind the end of her bed before pulling the dress off and wriggling into my jeans and jumper. I didn’t realise, until I’d finished, that the wardrobe mirror was reflected in the dressing-table mirror, and vice versa, which meant I wasn’t hidden from her line of sight after all.

I’m almost sure she was asleep. Her left cheek was resting on the pillow, facing the window, and her milky eyes were half-closed. She’d been dying for a long time now, and I wondered how much longer she’d have to wait.

I turned my socks the right way out and took my time putting them on. I didn’t want Cory’s humiliation—however it played out—to touch his mother. None of this was her fault; she’d done her feeble best to warn me away. When I visualised the near future I saw Diana at peace in a sunlit room, with nurses moving calmly round her bed, and a smell of starch, and fresh-cut flowers on the windowsill.

In the long nights, when the windows are black, the pain takes Diana in its jaws and shakes her.

In calmer moments she is chilled by sudden certainties that had never occurred to her before. “Cory hates me,” is one of them, and “I’m too weak to look after him,” and “The house has gone silent on me.”

Diana cannot exactly think anymore—thinking implies a degree of inner order—but memories come like violent flashes of light, occurring and recurring in the present tense.

“I saw the doctor,” she says, because a whole week has passed since her consultation in Harley Street and the subject needs to be broached. Cory is absorbed by a piece in the local newspaper and doesn’t look up.

“Cory?”

He stares at the paper.

“Cory?”