Cory tossed the pillow onto the bed and picked up one of my notebooks from the chair—the orange exercise book I’d been leafing through before I went to find him. I made a faint gesture of protest as he smoothed his hand over the cover, but when he apologised and offered to hand it over, I didn’t take it away.

“They’re just poems,” I said. “I wrote them ages ago, years ago, before Stella died. I thought if I reread them it might get me going again, but I don’t know. They all seem so thin and corny.”

“I understand,” he said. “It’s the same with me and my paintings. It’s like they were done by a different person.”

His thumb rifled the corner pages and I itched to take the book back.

“Will you let me look inside?” he said. “Please? I’ll let you laugh at my old paintings.”

No, I thought. But if I said no, a veil would fall between us—he would be suitably courteous and contrite, and I’d never get to know what I’d lost.

“OK.”

I turned away and finished making the bed, while Cory turned the pages.

“I was very much into abstract nouns at one point,” I said, in the hope that he couldn’t listen to me prattle and read at the same time. “Lone Despair weeps on her sunless isle, and stuff like that . . .”

I hoped he had found “Lone Despair,” or similar, because although it was a terrible poem, it was also fairly impersonal. Please God, let there not be any Tom poems in the orange exercise book.

“Who’s Tom?” he said.

I gave up on the bed and leapt across the room, so that I could read over his shoulder.

“Oh no, no, no!” I reached round and prised the book out of his hands. “Tom’s just a family friend,” I said. “My parents were friends with his parents. He’s a curator at the Wingate Gallery.”

“A family friend? Really?”

I suppose I looked surprised, or uncomprehending, because Cory added in an undertone, “I’m only teasing you.”

Teasing is such a light word, and so lightly meant, but it was the word I took, and turned over, and thought about most that evening. I’d forgotten what it was like to tease or be teased, but from the moment Cory said it I wanted to remember.

I was glad we didn’t eat in the kitchen: it was a big, cold, loveless barn of a room. “We don’t cook much,” Cory explained, when he saw my shiver. “Mum doesn’t have any appetite, and when it’s only me . . .” The plastic shopping bags were by the door waiting to be unloaded, so Cory emptied everything onto the kitchen table and we cobbled together a picnic from sliced bread, peanut butter, tortilla chips, KitKats, underripe bananas, and a bottle of white wine.

“All right?” said Cory, as he heaped everything onto a tray and added a couple of glasses.