It was David’s private sorrow that fate had forced him, again and again, into deceit. He comforted himself with the thought that his lies had all been to one end: to keep Jenny happy and safe. All these small Wrongs forming one large Right.

She’d come back to the village months ago, and yet they still hadn’t met face-to-face. The problem was that Freddie was going through a ‘hard time’ – bad break up – and she didn’t want anyone to see them together, tell Freddie. It was a bit silly, but Freddie really needed her at the minute, and he could be a bit possessive… she needed just a little more time… get him over his break-up first and then, gradually, introduce him to the idea that she had a boyfriend. David could understand that, couldn’t he? And David, floating in a sudden bubble of joy (she said he was her boyfriend! She said it!) told her that, yes, of course he could understand that. And it wouldn’t be for long, anyway, would it?

‘Only a few more weeks,’ Jenny said. That’s what she always said. It was beginning to seem like it was never going to happen… ‘I so nearly did it today! I was about to say how I ran into you in the village, but then he started getting all upset about his ex, and I just couldn’t do it.’ There was a sad smile in her voice. ‘Don’t hate me! You hate me, don’t you?’

‘Of course I don’t hate you,’ David answered. ‘I-I love you.’

‘You’re so sweet to wait like this!’

But, after a while, the situation began to torment him. After all, he lived a mere mile away from the love of his life but he couldn’t see her! Sal was sick. Sal was drunk. No, you can’t come round and see me, David, she’s… it’s awful. Tomorrow? But it was never tomorrow either. Sal was sick, or Freddie was needy, or the house was a state, and she was so sorry. He was so patient. Please don’t hate me!

It was driving him mad. It was too much. So he made a decision – if he couldn’t meet her, then at least he could see her. Just for an hour or two, while Mother slept.

It was strangely exciting, how familiar it was – just like the old days with the same old hiding places – behind the bins at her kitchen window, and at the dip at the end of her garden by the hills, prepared as always with night-vision goggles, a thermal coat, gloves, even a pad to kneel on. Sometimes he filmed her silhouette, recorded her voice. This time it was safe because she was safe, and there was no haring off to the city, no Marc to deal with.

The night the snow fell was the fourth time he’d watched. He almost didn’t go, but something told him he must. Something told him that this was a Significant Night, and so he kissed Catherine’s sleeping cheek, and made his way through the village, happy, happy, and the snow made everything beautiful, so beautiful, disguising the dirt. On the way the present and past collided in his mind, briefly merged, then pulled apart. The same image, the same memory. It happened again and again. He was sixteen and a recent growth spurt had pulled his school blazer tight across his shoulders, tighter still as he spied the pink paper, crushed like a butterfly in the middle of the street, and reached to pluck it up. Then, for a fraction of a second, he hovered between the decades, neither boy nor man, and then sank back into adult David, who only had to wait a little while, just a while longer, to go public as A Real Boyfriend. And again and again, and then there he was, teen and adult, crouched by the bins and the same incessant TV chatter, the same cigarette smoke drifting out of the open window, the same raised voices from the kitchen saying the same words: ‘… just to get your own room…’

He heard it all. He watched Sal barrelling out of the door, stumbling, weaving with drunk defiance towards the hills. He followed, of course he followed. He found the chiffon scarf, bloodstained and already half frozen, pointing like an arrow to the slumped form of Sal; he knew why he was there, and what he had to do. Time looped, merged. Everything was as it should be.

And when, days later, Jenny called him to tell him that the police had been asking questions… she had no alibi, but she hadn’t done anything – ’course she hadn’t done anything…

‘It’s just… it’s so horrible, David,’ she had whispered. ‘Mum dying and the thought that anyone thinks I did anything… if you could just… say you saw me that night? Tell the police that?

Of course he could say that. It was true after all.