‘The situation. Think about it. One minute she was struggling with her coursework, coming to me all the time to help her, and then all of a sudden it stopped. That wasn’t because she got better at the maths. I saw her paper, remember. It was full of errors. I assumed her grades were improving because she told me she was working really hard, putting in the hours in the library, but I was always in there and I never saw her. Not once.’

Luke yelps and shakes his finger where it made contact with the business end of his cigarette. He says, ‘None of that sounds like Satnam.’

‘I know, and that’s why we didn’t see it.’

‘You think the guy she said she cheated on me with was the Dean?’

‘Most likely. But I don’t think she ended it with you because she didn’t want to be with you any more. I think she just felt too ashamed.’

Luke groans. ‘I really loved her, Nevis. I still do.’

‘She told me something else, and I just didn’t connect the dots till it was too late. This is going to be hard to hear, but I still think I should tell you, because then you’ll understand.’

Luke nods an OK.

‘Last summer, after her parents found out about you, they found her a match, some guy from Birmingham. She refused to meet him. She wanted to be with you. At the start of the academic year she came to an agreement with her parents that, if she began doing better at uni, they would let her graduate and find a job. She was afraid that, if she had to drop out, she wouldn’t be able to resist the pressure they would put on her to get married.’

‘So she made sure she wouldn’t have to? Didn’t she tell you on the Sunday that she was thinking about leaving Avon though?’

‘Think about it. She was trapped. She couldn’t live with doing what it took to remain at Avon, and she didn’t want an arranged marriage. By transferring to another university she was hoping to free herself from her situation. But I think that, by the end, she’d just decided that the world was better off without her.’

As Luke takes this in, his mouth contorts and the flesh of his cheeks reddens. I should comfort him, Nevis thinks, slinging an arm awkwardly around his shoulders.