My little house filled with people. Filled with forms, with tasks, with long lists of what I had to do. Friends made me cups of tea and pushed pieces of toast at me that I tried to eat. The phone rang and rang. Gwen and Mary must have set up a rota between them, because as soon as one left it seemed that the other arrived. My parents turned up with an overcooked ginger cake in a tin I remembered from childhood, and bath salts. Joe came with whisky. He sat on the sofa, shook his head slowly from side to side in disbelief and called me “darling.” Fergus arrived, his face ashen with shock; he called me “sweetheart.” Everyone tried to hug me. I didn’t want to be hugged. Or, at least, I didn’t want to be hugged by anyone except Greg. I woke at night out of dreams in which he was holding me in his warm embrace, keeping me safe, and lay with dry, sore eyes, staring at the darkness, feeling the space in the bed beside me.

I needn’t have worried about what I had to do for at every stage there were plenty of people to tell me. I had become part of a bureaucratic process and was channeled smoothly and efficiently toward the end point, the funeral. But before there could be a funeral, the death had to be registered, and for that, I discovered, there needed to be an inquest to establish the cause of death.

We used to talk about dying. Once, while drunk, we answered a questionnaire online that then provided you with your date of death (me at eighty-eight, Greg at eighty-five), because death seemed ludicrously far away, a joke and an impossibility. If we had ever thought about it seriously, we would have assumed that when it came we would be old, and one of us would be holding the other’s hand. But I hadn’t been holding his hand and someone else had been with him. Milena Livingstone. The name crackled in my head. Who was she? Why had he been with her?

“Why do you think?” asked my mother, grimly, and I ordered her out of the house, slamming the door so hard behind her that little bits of plaster flaked to the floor.

“Why do you think?” asked Gwen, and I laid my head on the table, on top of all the bits of paper, and said I didn’t know, I had no idea. But I knew Greg. He would never . . . I didn’t finish the sentence.

“TELL ME ABOUT her.”

“Who?” Joe looked at me with a grave, attentive expression.

“Milena. Who was she?”

“Ellie.” His voice was kind. “I’ve already told you. I’ve no idea. I didn’t know about her.”

“She wasn’t a client?”