“Tired, yes, but it was more than that. Watching everything unfold had lurched me from anger to disgust and finally sorrow, had reminded me that love is fleeting and precious and should never be taken for granted. All of a sudden I felt the need to seize it with both hands, to assure myself that the same pain wouldn’t be mine.”

“I literally felt gutted, as if someone had hollowed me out, removed my core. Patients in the final stage of dementia revert to an almost neonatal state, their brains so atrophied they can only breathe and digest, suck and pout. That was how I felt. I continued to function, but only at the most basic level, my existence little more than a collection of primitive reflexes.”

“If I let myself think of it the pain and anger were still fresh, adrenalin racing down my limbs to pool, hot and itchy, in fingertips and toes.”

“I had learnt from my work: that all pain is erased in the passage of time. Not just by, but in. In ten decades hence it would be as if nothing had ever happened. There would be no relics, no scars. No jug to piece together, no bone fragments to date. Emotions fade and leave no trace. Only the inanimate remains.”

“The thing is, I fell in love with Luke, not Cary. Fell for the sheen and the sweat, the adrenalin of the hunt. Faltered, reeled, collapsed. There was no falling with Cary. Loving him was gradual and logical, inevitable as the path of a glacier. But Luke was a thunderclap, appearing out of a clear blue sky, soaking me to my skin, then moving on leaving everything looking different. And post-Luke nothing was the same.”

“I was out of control, manic, less myself than I’d ever been. Like Eve must have felt after the fall, I reflected as I drove away. Leaving Eden for a land unknown.”

“For a second I felt content, an emotion so unfamiliar it took me a moment to identify it.”