Downstairs, the television was on.
She could hear it through the floor: the low murmur, and then Julian laughing at something, that easy unforced laugh he had, the one that had made her turn round at a wedding in June.
Amelia Marchetti sat on the floor with her back against the radiator for twenty minutes.
She did not cry. She had cried at four o'clock in a church and she would cry, badly, in a car park in nine days' time. She sat with the file open on her knees and went through it a third time, and what happened in her over those twenty minutes was not grief and was not rage.
It was arithmetic.
He is thirty-two and I am twenty-eight. He has three hundred and twenty of my father's people. He has the house, and my name is on it under his. If I leave tonight I am a widow's daughter with a solicitor's file and no money, against a man with six lawyers who will call it a bereavement and a breakdown, and it will take four years and I will lose.
If I stay, I am in his study every day of my life.
He thinks I don't know.
That is the only thing I have. That is the whole of it. He thinks I don't know, and that lasts exactly as long as I can hold my face.
She closed the file.
She put it inside the ironing-board cover, which she understood even at the time to be a temporary and ridiculous solution, and she went into the bathroom and washed her face and looked at herself in the mirror for about four seconds, which was all she could stand.
Then she went downstairs.
Julian was on the sofa with his shoes off and the fire on, and he looked up and put his arm out along the back of the cushion, the way he had every evening for eight months, so that she could get under it.
"There you are," he said. "God, what a day. Are you all right?"
Amelia got under his arm.
He pulled her in without looking away from the television and put his mouth against her hair, and his hand came to rest on her hip the way it had rested there four thousand times, warm and absent and entirely certain of its welcome.
Do not go rigid, Amelia thought. Whatever else happens tonight, do not go rigid.
She did not go rigid.
What she did instead was worse, and she found it out in about nine seconds: her whole body settled into him the way it always had, gratefully, like something coming in out of the rain — because it had been doing that since a wedding in June and had not been informed of any change in circumstances.
"How was yours?" she said, into his shirt.
"How was yours?" she said.