Rosa couldn’t remember when he’d first started calling her Cogs, although she knew it was to do with her affinity for clockwork, and was always spoken in warm tones of affection and admiration. She’d always loved the name, always felt a pleasant sensation of warmth whenever he’d affectionately called her by it, even in front of guests and distinguished visitors.

Shoulder-to-shoulder – that was how they had faced the world, a team. And now he was gone, and she was alone, and it was anguish, the worst thing imaginable; and yet it was still better than the alternative, better than never having known or loved him at all. She would do it all again, exactly the same way: every minute, every word, every choice. Even during those times when he infuriated her, when he saddened her, she had still loved him to distraction, and James, in turn, had kept his promise by making her happier than she had ever thought possible. And if this agony was the price to pay at the end of a life well lived, then it was worth every tear, it was worth every single tear. Better to lose such a love than never to have had it at all.

It was a good, clean sorrow that Rosa felt – pure as snow – as she prepared to say goodbye to her husband for the last time. But then, to her surprise, a fat, ripe plum fell into her lap, impossibly purple against the black of her mourning dress. She looked up and saw several branches growing along the church’s roof, all coming from a tree in the centre of the aisle – a plum tree heavy with fat, frosted fruits, its roots growing straight through the floor tiles, splitting them into broken pieces.

Rosa nudged her eldest son, Albert. ‘What is that tree doing in here?’ she asked.

He glanced round. His eyes were the same shade of brown as his father’s. ‘What tree?’

Rosa gestured impatiently back at the aisle, but then another plum fell into her lap, followed by another and another. She looked up in time to see the church roof peel back, exposing a dark winter night sky filled with lacy parasols and thousands of stars. Snow blew in across the floor, and the straightforward sorrow she’d felt warped into a complicated tangle of regrets and bitterness, thorny as briars.

The next moment the real world won the battle altogether and the what-might-have-been vanished in a last groan of organ music and the funeral incense of extinguished candles. Rosa was back in Beatrice’s garden, gasping at the shock of the icy air and the wrenching loss as that other life was torn away from her. Surely it would have hurt no more to have her very spine ripped out?