This is ridiculous, she tells herself. He’ll call.

He doesn’t.

At eight thirty, knowing she can’t face spending the rest of the evening in the house, she gets up, pulls on her coat and grabs her keys.

It’s a short walk to Greg’s bar, even shorter if you half run in your trainers. She pushes open the door and is hit by a wall of noise. On the small stage to the left a man dressed as a woman is singing raucously to a disco beat, accompanied by loud catcalls from a rapt crowd. At the other end, the tables are packed, the spaces between them thick with taut, tightly clad bodies.

It takes her a few minutes to spot him, moving swiftly along the bar, a tea-towel slung over his shoulder. She squeezes through to the front, half wedged under somebody’s armpit, and shouts his name.

It takes several goes for him to hear her. Then he turns. Her smile freezes: his expression is oddly unwelcoming.

‘Well, this is a fine time to turn up.’

She blinks. ‘I’m sorry?’

‘Nearly nine o’clock? Are you guys kidding me?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘I’ve had him all day. Andy was meant to go out tonight. Instead he’s had to cancel just to stay home and babysit. I can tell you he’s not happy.’

Liv struggles to hear him over the noise in the bar. Greg holds up a hand, and leans forward to take someone’s order.

‘I mean, you know we love him, right?’ he says, when he returns. ‘We love him to death. But treating us like some kind of default babysitter is –’

‘I’m looking for Paul,’ she says.

‘He’s not with you?’

‘No. And he’s not answering his phone.’

‘I know he’s not answering his phone. I thought that was because he was with – Oh, this is crazy. Come through the bar.’ He lifts the hatch so that she can squeeze in, holds his hands up to the roar of complaint from those waiting. ‘Two minutes, guys. Two minutes.’

In the tiny corridor to the kitchen, the beat thumps through the walls, making Liv’s feet vibrate. ‘But where has he gone?’ she says.

‘I don’t know.’ Greg’s anger has evaporated. ‘We woke up to a note this morning saying he’d had to go. That was it. He was kind of weird last night after you left.’

‘What do you mean, weird?’

He looks shifty, as if he’s already said too much.

‘What?’

‘Not himself. He takes this stuff pretty seriously.’ He bites his lip.

‘What?’

Greg looks awkward. ‘Well, he – he said he thought this painting was going to ruin any chance the two of you had of having a relationship.’

Liv stares at him. ‘You think he’s …’

‘I’m sure he didn’t mean –’

But Liv is already pushing her way out through the bar.

Empty of anything, Sunday lasts for ever. Liv sits in her still house, her phone silent, her thoughts spinning and humming, and waits for the end of the world.

She rings his mobile number one more time, then ends the call abruptly when the answer-phone kicks in.

He’s gone cold.

Of course he hasn’t.

He’s had time to think about everything he’s throwing away by siding with me.

You have to trust him.

She wishes Mo were there.

The night creeps in, the skies thickening, smothering the city in a dense fog. She fails to watch television, sleeps in weird, disjointed snatches, and wakes at four with her thoughts congealing in a toxic tangle. At half past five she gives up, runs a bath and lies in it for some time, staring up through the skylight at the oblivious dark. She blow-dries her hair carefully, and puts on a grey blouse and pinstriped skirt that David had once said he loved on her. They made her look like a secretary, he’d observed, as if that might be a good thing. She adds some fake pearls and her wedding ring. She does her makeup carefully. She is grateful for the means to conceal the shadows under her eyes, her sallow, exhausted skin.

He will come, she tells herself. You have to have faith in something.

Around her, the world wakes up slowly. The Glass House is shrouded in mist, emphasizing her sense of isolation from the rest of the city. Beneath it, queues of traffic, visible only as tiny illuminated dots of red brake lights, move slowly, like blood in clogged arteries. She drinks some coffee, and eats half a piece of toast. The radio tells of traffic jams in Hammersmith, and a plot to poison a politician in Ukraine. When she has finished, she tidies and wipes the kitchen so that it gleams.

Then she pulls an old blanket from the airing cupboard and wraps it carefully around The Girl You Left Behind. She folds it as if she were wrapping a present, keeping the picture turned away from her so that she doesn’t have to see Sophie’s face.

Fran is not in her box. She’s sitting on an upturned bucket, gazing out across the cobbles to the river, untangling a piece of twine that is wrapped several hundred times around a huge clump of supermarket carrier bags.

She looks up as Liv approaches, with two mugs, then at the sky. It has sunk around them in thick droplets, muffling sound, ending the world at the river’s edge.

‘Not running?’

‘Nope.’

‘Not like you.’

‘Nothing’s like me, apparently.’

Liv hands over a coffee. Fran takes a sip, grunts with pleasure, then looks at her. ‘Don’t stand there like a lemon, then. Take a seat.’