I suppose it’s silly to talk about “always, always” when I’d only been at Byrne Hall for a few weeks, but the days had fallen into a fixed pattern and I’d come to know the difference between normal and awry. Of course, he might have slipped to the bathroom, and if so it was no great surprise to find the bedding in a muddle—only why was it such a violent muddle, with the duvet tangled round the legs of the easel, and the pillows scattered to all four corners of the room? And why was the bottom sheet cold to the touch? And why—although I waited five, ten, twenty minutes—didn’t he come back?

I picked up one of the pillows and wandered to the window. The wedding preparations were in full swing now. The tables had been crammed into the canopy and dressed with silver cutlery and glasses and flowers. There were people on stepladders testing the fairy lights, men lifting speakers from a van, and the mother of the bride was in animated debate with someone over the phone. Perhaps Cory was out there too, having a quiet word with the organisers, letting them know that “the family” was home today and would appreciate some privacy? There was something flattering about that idea. One of the workers—a girl crossing the lawn with a crate of wineglasses—glanced up at my window. I moved out of view and sat down at the writing table.

All day I walk from room to room, just to hear my footsteps echo.

I reread the line I’d been carrying around in my head for days and had written down on the first page of my notebook. I thought it would generate more lines once I’d fixed it on the page.

“All day I walk from room to room . . .”

I must have read those words a hundred times—whispering them out loud, closing my eyes against them, staring them out, altering the emphases, and waiting, waiting for inspiration—but I couldn’t get anything else to come. The phrase no longer breathed. All I’d done was to lay it out, neat as a corpse, on the faint blue line at the top of page one. I tapped my pen against my teeth and wondered about ditching poetry and trying my hand at fiction.