I wandered into the small room next door to our bedroom, which, for the time being, served as a junk room, although we had plans for it. It was full of boxes of books and stray objects we’d never got around to unpacking, though we had moved to this house well over a year ago, as well as an old-fashioned bath with claw feet and cracked brass taps that I had picked up from a reclamation center and had planned to install in our bathroom once I had done something about the taps. We had got stuck carrying it up the stairs, I remembered, unable to go backward or forward and giggling helplessly, while his mother had shouted useless instructions at us from the hallway.

His mother. I had to call his mother and father. I had to tell them that their eldest son was dead. I felt breathless and had to lean against the door jamb. How do you break that kind of news? I returned to the bedroom and sat on the bed once more, picking up the phone that was on my bedside table. For a moment, I couldn’t remember their number, and when I did, I found it hard to press the buttons. My fingers weren’t working properly.

I hoped she wouldn’t answer, but she did. Her high voice sounded aggrieved to be called at this late hour.

“Kitty.” I pressed the receiver to my ear and closed my eyes. “It’s me, Ellie.”

“Ellie, how—”

“I’ve got some bad news,” I said. And then, before she could draw breath to say anything: “Greg’s dead.” There was complete silence from the other end, as if she had hung up. “Kitty?”

“Hello,” she said. Her voice had dwindled; she sounded very far away. “I don’t quite understand.”

“Greg’s dead,” I persisted. “He died in a car crash. I’ve only just heard.”

“Excuse me,” she said. “Can you hold on a moment?”

I waited and then another voice came on the line, in a kind of gruff, no-nonsense bark. “Ellie. Paul here. What’s this?”

I repeated what I’d said. The words were becoming more and more unreal.

Paul Manning gave a short, nervous cough. “Dead, you say?” In the background I could hear sobbing.

“Yes.”

“But he’s only thirty-eight.”

“It was a road accident.”

“A crash?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know if they told me; maybe they did. It was hard to take everything in.”

He asked me more questions, detailed questions, none of which I could answer. It was as if information would give him some kind of control.