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classless in a way that screamed ‘public school but works in media’. ‘Look, I’m here for anything you need. It’s the least I can do. Sim is very important to me. Not just as a client. As a friend.’
    ‘I see you’rehaving trouble with the past tense too.’
    ‘Yes. It feels …’
    ‘Disloyal? Just breathing feels disloyal. I felt like a murderer when I cancelled his subscription to GQ .’
    Reece laughed. Throaty. Male. ‘He said you were funny.’
    ‘Did he?’ Orla liked Reece. He had a light touch without abandoning depth, and he’d obviously been fond of Sim. So he should be , whispered the valentine. He was on twenty per cent.
    ‘He told me lots about you, Orla. He missed you terribly.’
    ‘I should have come over sooner.’
    ‘Oh look … we’d all behave differently if we could predict the future. Listen, Orla, I’ve got to go. New York’s on the other line. We’ll have lunch, yes? And call me. If you need anything. Anything at all.’
    The candle guttered, making the dark perimeter of the sitting room wobble. The table was cosy as a campfire.
    ‘You made a start, I see.’ Maude sloshed red wine into their glasses. A jet choker glittered at her neck. ‘First time the place has looked shipshape in months.’
    ‘I folded up his clothes, sorted them into piles. Charity. Bin. Me.’ Orla pursued the last smudge of cheesecake around her plate with her finger. Her appetite had raised its head again; Maude’s supper on a tray had been welcome. ‘Some of them were new to me. There were shirts I never saw him in.’
    ‘He was rather a dandy.’
    ‘I put his books to one side. Perhaps you’ll take them for the shop? I’ll hang on to this.’ Orla reached in to her bag and fished out a copy of One Day . ‘We talked about this on the phone. He said he should have got the part in the film.’
    ‘Didn’the say that about every part in every film?’ Maude swirled her Barolo, making a turbulent sea of it.
    ‘I’ve put away his glasses.’ The ones he never admitted to needing. ‘I’ve disposed of his medication, as the containers say. I kept the vitamins. I’m keeping his laptop. It was a present from me last Christmas when he bought me an iPad. I’ve packed up his passport, his birth certificate, his wallet. I’ve cut up his bank cards.’ That had felt brutal. ‘There’s one thing I can’t find. And it’s bugging me. It should be here. He wrote in it every day.’
    ‘The journal? Silly big leather thing like something out of Dickens? It’s definitely here somewhere. I often caught him scribbling in it when I nipped down with a little bite of something.’
    ‘You fed him?’
    ‘You make him sound like a guinea pig. He didn’t mention it? Oh yes, I fed the boy. Otherwise the stink of stockpiled takeaway containers might have felled me in the hallway.’
    ‘He told me he was learning to cook. Easy things. Like pasta.’
    ‘There was a pasta.’ Maude grimaced. ‘Best forgotten. If I had eyes like Sim’s I’d expect the nearest gullible old bat to feed me, too.’
    Sim was so fond of fibs. From their earliest days together, she’d learned that a casual, ‘Hi, what have you been up to?’ was invariably answered with an evasive, ‘Oh this and that’. But now details were important.
    ‘I’ve looked in every drawer, every cupboard. The journal isn’t here. Reece – I think you met him, he’s Sim’s agent? – he brought the personal effects here from the hospital so it wasn’t with Sim when he collapsed.’
    ‘I’llhelp you look in the morning. Wine doesn’t improve my sleuthing skills. It’s here. He was very attached to it. Abnormally so. Oh.’ Maude squinted over at the dresser, her eyes on the pink envelope propped against a casserole dish. ‘What’s this? It’s addressed to you, dear.’ Maude leaned over to pick it up. ‘Did you bring this with you?’
    ‘Yes. It’s nothing.’
    ‘Oh good lord, it’s a valentine.’ Maude put her hand over her mouth.