So whatever happened, DCI Stoner was unlikely to be taking up a resident’s parking bay in our street any time soon.

And for the first time in a long time, I felt free. Perhaps Tara and I could make it through all of this, I thought.

Fat Phil’s car pulled up. A one-off job. He got out, hiked his trousers up over that belly like a prize marrow and frowned at our house. He saw me at the window and raised a hand in salute. He wasn’t laughing at me now.

I went to find Tara.

She was sitting on our bed with Marlon on her lap, and my heart ached to see the pair of them in the bleak uniforms of mourning.

Tara’s black dress.

Marlon’s white shirt and clip-on black tie.

They were both too young for those clothes.

I got down on my knees in front of them. They held each other so tightly, and so still, that they seemed like one person.

I placed my hands on their hands.

‘Everything’s going to be all right,’ I promised.

Tara nodded. She did not seem convinced.

And then we went to the funeral.

TARA

We came down the aisle of the church and it was like leafing through one of those old-fashioned photo albums where suddenly you are being stared at by faces from your past, all those people that drift in and out of your life. But the faces were all older now, sometimes shockingly so; all those women who had worked with Mary and I around ten years ago when there were still jobs for us at the glossy magazines – editors, photographers, journalists, stylists – all those smart, single city girls who assumed they had a job for life.

As I was handed an order of service, some of their heads turned to register my presence in the church, a few whispers passing through them, and the eyes that I caught had a cold hard light. I had made no space for these people in my new world. Not as friends, not as colleagues, not as even the vaguest of acquaintance. It was true. I had not made any attempt to stay in contact with any of them. I had not returned their messages or emails asking for a drink, or a job, or a kind word. Too busy, too selfish, too Tara.

Christian scooped up Marlon, our boy suddenly wide-eyed and awed at the strange theatre of the church, and all these solemn adults, and the palpable sense of sadness. Mary’s parents were in the front row – her fierce heavyset mother and her thin, diffident balding dad, like a married couple in one of those old seaside postcards, I always thought – their faces etched with the unbearably raw grief of parents who have to bury their child. We took our place in a pew towards the front of the church and I swallowed the cruel finality of the day.

Mary was gone.