When it was all over, the last thing she expected to feel was embarrassed. Perhaps she could have felt something else had the suitcase not fallen at exactly that angle, causing her to hit the floor in exactly that way, hitching up her polyester night slip—just enough.

He had placed all her woollen blankets on top of her cupboard the morning after an unusually balmy spring night when, out of the blue, she had not felt cold in bed. Now, lying there dead, a pool of blood by the side of her head and one of her daughter’s Lego figures sticking into her right shoulder blade, she remembers the conversation. She had been pairing socks. The two enormous blankets were neatly folded at the foot of her side of their freshly made bed.