Word got out, of course it did. He was the boss’s son, after all, at Hopegoods, the men’s and women’s outfitters in the High Street where she worked in haberdashery. After the first round of sympathetic comments her colleagues learned not to mention his name. This sort of news had become almost commonplace.

But as the months went by and they heard nothing further, Ruby’s protective wall began to disintegrate. She sank into a chasm of grief and guilt that she experienced as real, physical agony, from which she could see no escape. She seemed to be in the bottom of a well, hemmed in on all sides by darkness, with only a glimmer of light too impossibly high to reach and too exhausting to climb towards. There were days when she felt she simply could not carry on and sometimes, walking by the river, she imagined wading through the deep mud and giving herself up to the cold, heartless current. But she never found the courage. Her mother, still struggling with her own bereavement just a few scant years before, did what she could to comfort her daughter, but nothing eased the pain.

In the face of Ruby’s persistent refusals to go out with them, their once close group of friends drifted away one by one, and gave up inviting her, or even calling round. She stopped writing in her diary because she could think of nothing to say. She felt like an empty shell, the kind you find on the beach, bleached and whitened in the salt and the sun, hard to imagine that it had once held a living creature inside. She could not remember the last time she had laughed.

But how could she go on living otherwise? Without Bertie she felt like half a person, not really alive at all. She could gain no enjoyment from any of the things they’d had fun doing together: going to the pub, to the cinema, to dances, for walks in the woods. She wore only black, or occasionally charcoal grey. He had made the ultimate sacrifice, she reasoned, so how else could she honour him? It felt insulting to his memory, somehow, to wear anything cheerful. This is how my life will be from now until I die. It’s only right.

Her dutifully regular visits to his parents only served to underline their mutual loss. It twisted the knife in her heart to see his mother so devastated, his father so grimly stoic. Afterwards she would emerge exhausted, as though carrying the boulder of their grief, as well as her own. Leaving the overheated fug of their house, she would look up at the sky and inhale deeply, trying to draw strength from the fresh air. One step at a time, she’d say to herself, one day at a time. This misery will soon ease.

Of course it didn’t, not really. The grief was still so intense it sometimes took her breath away, and at work she would have to hide in the ladies’ toilet until she could compose herself. She discovered, by trial and error, how to present a brave face to the world. At first it was an unreliable mask, so brittle that it threatened to shatter at the slightest unguarded word or prompted memory but, as the days passed, and then weeks and months, the disguise became more durable until now, two years later, it had almost become a natural extension of her real self. In fact, she was no longer sure who her real self was.