What was the etiquette here? Should Ellen kneel down too and also kiss the photo? No, surely not. She’d never even met Colleen. That would be entirely inappropriate. A handshake would be better. Perhaps the alternative would be to give the headstone a polite little pat? “Lovely to meet you.” Ellen imagined herself telling this story to Julia, who would be shrieking, her hand covering her eyes, the horror, the horror!

Patrick placed the flowers down in front of the headstone with a rustle of cellophane. He cleared his throat. Ellen breathed in and out through her nostrils.

“Well, it’s us again, Colleen. We’re just on our way up to have lunch with your mum and dad. Your mum is making that chicken risotto again.”

As Patrick spoke, his voice became more natural.

“Remember how offended she was when you told her it was too bland? Now it’s got so much garlic you can smell it as soon as you walk in the front door. It’s such a beautiful day. We wish you were— Oh, and guess what? Jack’s team won at soccer yesterday. Their first game!”

Ellen squirmed. He’d been going to say: We wish you were here with us. But then he’d remembered his pregnant fiancée.

“We smashed those guys,” said Jack comfortably.

“They did,” said Patrick. “And Jack played so well. You would have been so proud.”

“You were watching, right?” said Jack. “From in heaven. You probably have this, like, giant grandstand where everyone goes to watch all their different relatives back on Earth playing sports, and you get whatever food and drink you want, and if you’ve got more than one relative watching at the same time, you’ve got this screen that sort of splits in two, and you can, like, switch back and forth—”

“OK, mate,” interrupted Patrick. “Anyway, Colleen, we’ve got other big news too, haven’t we, Jack?”

Jack looked blank. Patrick tilted his head at Ellen and said, “The baby!”

“Oh yeah,” said Jack. “Maybe Mum knows already if it’s a boy or a girl! She probably knows, right? Like maybe she saw it coming off the assembly line in heaven, like in a factory, and it’s like a baby factory, and Mum was there, and she’s, like, hey, that’s Ellen’s new baby, you’re going to be Jack’s little brother! Or, you’re going to be Jack’s—”

“Right,” said Patrick. “So, this is Ellen.”

He looked up at Ellen, reached for her hand and took it in his.

Should I kneel down? I should kneel. But what if I’m sick? No, I should definitely kneel.

She knelt down. There would be grass stains on her cream pants. But it seemed the right thing to have done because Patrick’s face suddenly filled with some complex emotion, and Jack slung an affectionate arm around Ellen’s shoulders, something he’d never done before.

“Ellen and I are getting married and I know you’d be happy, Colleen, because I always remember that day, when you told me I had to find someone lovely.” Patrick’s voice broke, and he squeezed Ellen’s hand painfully hard. “And I said I wouldn’t. But I have. And she is lovely. She’s so lovely. And she’s made us very happy.”

“Yeah.” Jack banged his chin gently against Ellen’s shoulder.

“Oh, you guys,” said Ellen, because she didn’t know what else to say. She could smell cold damp earth and Patrick’s aftershave and Jack’s peanut buttery breath. Patrick’s hand was warm around hers, and for a moment the waves of nausea receded and Ellen was filled with glorious relief.

No, this was not an excruciating story to laugh over with Julia. Its very awkwardness and awfulness made it somehow essentially human. It was one of those rare, poignant, pure moments that encapsulated everything that was wonderful and tragic about life.

Today was the fourth Sunday of the month. That means Patrick had lunch with Colleen’s parents.

It never changed. We arranged our holidays around it.

I only went once, after we’d been together for a few months. It wasn’t a success. It was too soon. I shouldn’t have agreed to go, but Patrick seemed anxious to take me. He insisted, in fact. He seemed to be in a hurry, like this was something that needed to be done, to be ticked off some checklist. I got the impression he thought it would somehow be good for his in-laws. I remember my mother telling me that it was a mistake. “Oh, Saskia, you mustn’t go—that would be too cruel,” she said. But like an idiot I thought that Patrick knew best.

And of course Mum was right. It was terrible for Frank and Millie, to see me with Patrick, to see their grandson running to me. They were still raw with grief. You could sense it as soon as you walked in the house, as though tears had a scent that pervaded the air. They both had the identical shocked expressions of people who had just a moment before been punched in the faces There were photos of her everywhere. It was like a museum with one subject: Colleen. Colleen as a baby. Colleen on her first day of school. Colleen and Patrick. Colleen and Jack. I couldn’t let my eyes rest anywhere. Although strangely, I remember not feeling any envy when I saw the photos of Colleen and Patrick together; I was utterly, idiotically confident of his love. It was the photos of Colleen and Jack that made me feel unsettled: the evidence that I wasn’t really Jack’s mother.

After that, I always let Patrick and Jack go up to the mountains without me, and I always spent that Sunday catching up on housework, or seeing a friend, or in the time before I got my leg problem, doing some exercise. I quite enjoyed the break, having the house nice and quiet to myself. It seems completely foreign to me now, the idea of enjoying time on my own, when these days I have my whole life to myself, and time outside of work is a gigantic expanse of empty space, an endless desert I fill by watching Patrick.