It was, to him, an encounter of sudden intimacy in this public place; the angle of her head, her posture, her hands. He watched as a man – soused and staggering, every careful step an acknowledgement of the spinning earth and its axial tilt – fell into the vacant chair opposite her, giving Helena a slow, marinated gaze until his head fell, weighty as a curling stone, and slid across the table. John and another onlooker jumped up to help at the same time and, between them, dragged the man to the back of the pub to sleep it off.

When she arrived the day after, there was another woman in the studio. Very young. That was the first moment she understood her work might be good.

That night, she was glad Anna could not see her tears as she pressed the phone to her ear, aching to her daughter’s dear voice. She was calmed by Anna’s stories of her day and the thought of her making supper, even in her kitchen so far away.

She continued to read and he was almost asleep when Peter heard her say, ‘I missed her more than ever this time. Everywhere we were made me think of her, I almost thought I’d see her if I turned my head.’

He was fully awake now.

‘Sometimes I think I see her too,’ Peter said, ‘out of the corner of my eye. If you can see a feeling.’

‘Yes, I think you can.

Doctors turned to ice with emotion. The nurse who fell asleep in the middle of an operation. The infant put back together after hours of surgery, only to be killed by a bomb that fell on the hospital a moment later. The father who kept a scrap of cloth tied with a string around his neck, filled with teeth, proof his son had existed, though Mara knew he would never be sure they were his son’s. The same man who watched his shoes being stolen from his feet by someone who thought he was dead.

The night was clear and still; the reflection of the stars began to settle into the water; it was as if we were floating in the sky.