I DROVE GWEN’S car home and parked it outside the gate, then let myself into the house. It was so empty, so silent, so cheerless. I wandered from room to room, picking up objects and putting them down again, running my finger along shelves to collect dust. Perhaps I would move. After I came back from wherever I was going, I would put the house on the market.

I came to a halt in the chilly living room where I closed the curtains. I decided I’d light a fire to brighten it up. The basket already contained pieces of kindling and some tightly screwed up pieces of paper. We’d got into the habit of doing it with used envelopes, letters we didn’t need, scraps of paper. Greg used to talk about identity theft and that it was better than buying a shredder.

I collected a bag of coal from my work shed, then set to work, although I’d rarely lit a fire before—that had always been Greg’s task. I made meals, he made fires. I laid several of the homemade fire-lighters in the grate, then arranged kindling in a wigwam over the top before striking a match and holding the flame against one of the twists of paper. It caught quickly on the dry kindling and I immediately felt the comforting warmth on my face. I sat cross-legged in front of the fire and began to toss the little screwed-up pieces into the flames and watched as they were consumed. Some I unrolled and read. Articles in six-month-old newspapers seem more interesting when you’re about to throw them on the fire. Mostly there were useless old envelopes and letters offering to lend us money or telling us we’d won some in a competition. It struck me that these were the last traces of Greg’s ordinary daily life that were left in the house, the rubbish that surrounds all of us. I was about to toss another into the flames when something caught my eye.

It was just a fragment of handwriting scrawled on the edge of the paper but it looked familiar and I couldn’t think why. I untwisted the paper and smoothed it out.

It had the office letterhead—Foreman and Manning Accountants—but above that, in her flamboyant calligraphy, was written: “I’ll ring you about this—Milena Livingstone.” And underneath the letterhead, in a different ink, a name was written over and over again. Marjorie Sutton, Marjorie Sutton, Marjorie Sutton . . . About twenty signatures running down the page.