A pigeon sails by his little window on the world. The lights have gone out on the Halcyon Days. Nevis is alone. He knows this because he has been watching the boat for hours now and he saw her mother leave. It would have been easier, in a way, to have killed the two of them. But this is better, more exquisite, for what could be more terrible to a mother than the death of her child? To leave this world knowing that he has taken from Honor Smith the two people who truly gave her life meaning. What a sweet sensation that will be!

It would have been so easy to have satisfied him. He was an easy kid to satisfy. When he was hungry he took a biscuit, when he was tired he went to bed, when he was bored he played computer games. He had wanted love too but Amanda had met his longing with a kind of haughty contempt. The story she’d spun was that she’d adored him up until the point that he had disgraced her, and for years he’d believed her, blamed himself. Only now does he see that this too was one of his mother’s self-serving lies. The focus of her love had always been booze. She’d never really loved him. She’d deprived him of what every child has a right to expect. And so the longing for love twisted and turned inside him like a broken cobweb. When he wanted to love Zoe, to take possession of her, to feel her from the inside out, didn’t he have a right? If she had only said yes to him, he could have taken what he wanted. She could have given it to him and got on with her life. He would soon have tired of her. Instead she denied him and denied him and then set him up to fail. What happened was her fault for refusing, not his for wanting.

He has no expectations of being reunited with Zoe in death and realises only now that he does not care. It was never Zoe who interested him, only the idea of Zoe, of all the Zoes, the young men and women he met at St Olaf’s and then here at Avon who burst with life, while he, the boy wonder, the genius, felt dead inside. He would put himself in their company only to see something of their light diminished by it. They were the sun and he only ever the shade. They were life – the name ‘Zoe’ literally means life – but the only thing that ever lived in him was death. I see now, he thinks, that I took an ordinary girl and transformed her in my mind into someone magical and special, someone worthy of my obsession. She would be the light to illuminate my darkness. Oh, what a fool I was.