It happened on a Sunday in June, in the flat in Bloomsbury, in the late afternoon light that came through the windows and made the whole room glow the colour of weak tea. They had been together for seventeen years. Ed had stopped counting the exact number of months after the first decade, partly because the months had begun to blur together in the way that happy time does, and partly because he had realised that the counting itself was a kind of anxiety—a need to hold on to something that was a...