But then the day came, somewhere around the seventh year of our first meeting. Over dinner, he told me that he would be moving home to London. And it would be best for me if I stayed behind. I told him it wasn’t entirely his decision to make. But we both knew that ours had been a relationship built on borrowed time. Every book he had ever given to me, every note that he had ever written, every mundane shred of the evidence of us, I stoked into a blazing bonfire. The neighbour’s children came out to watch, instinctively drawn to the flames. I wept, long after the ashes had cooled.