He said it lightly, but with the faintest emphasis on the word you. “I couldn’t abandon you.” I wanted to ask what, if anything, that meant, but I hesitated. Perhaps—surrounded by high drama, and with police cars strewn across the driveway, and the bath full of bright-red water—perhaps this wasn’t the time or place to be questioning the nuances of a casual phrase. I picked through the gravel at the top of the steps, sorting the stones into whites and pale greys.

“Do you mean, you couldn’t abandon me?” I said eventually, because—propriety be damned—I had to know. “Or do you mean, you couldn’t abandon . . . me?”

Tom added a white stone to the white pile, and a couple of greys to the grey pile.

“I mean,” he said, “that I couldn’t abandon . . . you.”

We carried on sorting the stones, as if we were doing something delicate and important, and sometimes our fingers touched. One of the policemen came down the steps muttering about phone reception, and we drew apart to let him pass. His shoes scattered the gravel piles, and we glanced at one another behind his back.

“Why are there two ambulances?” I said.

“One’s for . . . you know. The other’s for his mother. They’re taking her to hospital.”

“Oh.”

We fell silent. There was a lot of brisk, quiet talk behind us, and footsteps went in and out of the house. Blue lights swirled and walkie-talkies crackled.

“Poor Diana,” I murmured.

I put my half-drunk coffee on the step and got to my feet. One of the ambulances had its doors wide open, and it must have been Diana inside, although even when I came close I could hardly see her for people and tubes. One of the paramedics stood aside momentarily, and I glimpsed an oxygen mask where her face ought to be.

The man stood and watched; there was nothing else for him to do. He was only a boy, younger than me, with haunted eyes and a shaving rash. He said, “There were roses on the bed.”

I frowned.

“Roses?”

The man looked round at the house, and back at Diana. He wasn’t telling me as such; he was just trying to get those roses out of his system.

“A bunch in her folded hands and petals all over the bed. They were completely rank, half of them. It was like something out of . . .”

A poem? I supplied silently. A horror film? Come on, Stella, what colour are they? Grey? Green?

“. . . a weird dream.”

He shivered and climbed aboard.

Tom came up beside me, and we watched Diana’s ambulance lumber down the potholed drive, the wet woods reflecting its flickering lights. The bustle of voices and footsteps carried on behind us; I heard someone running up the stairs and a phone ringing in the hall.

“Aren’t flowers supposed to be dead by November?” I wondered out loud.