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It’s almost a year on since the fire and I can still smell her. I don't want her face to fade. I don't want to forget a single thing. There aren’t enough pictures of the two of us. Just the engagement and the wedding, and nothing much since.

I work out of the Basset house now, an hour and a quarter south. I rebuilt the mortuary here to match the one she torched, down to every detail as I couldn't stand it any other way.

Four in the morning is the best time to be down here. My phone's on silent and Tomek isn't ruining the quiet with the latest thing the government's putting in the water. Just me and whoever's turned up in a black bag needing my attention. The dead are good company. They never interrupt, and not one of them has ever pointed out that I'm not in control anymore. So this is fine. This is great. Then why is everything so gray?

The doors bang open behind me, and there goes the quiet.

Tomek strolls in like he's got nowhere to be. He doesn't go upstairs to raid my fridge, nor does he start some spiel. He parks himself near me and waits.

"That one's off the fire on Richmond Terrace, boss." He shifts his weight. "Nothing on her. No bag, no phone. They should have a name soon. Then we find her family."

"Or I sponsor the burial, as always."

"Yeah." A pause. "You want me to hang about? I can hang about."

"No. Go make coffee. And stay off my mug. I'll know."

"I never touch your mug."

"You touch my mug constantly, Tomek."

When the door shuts behind him, I unzip her.

Early thirties. Dark hair, soaked through from whatever they threw on the fire. The right side of her face is gone, burned cheek to ear before she got out, so I leave the face and look at the rest of her, and the rest of her is where my body quits on me.

She's tall. About Manon's height, the height I've followed down more streets than I'll ever admit to. Same hair. Same build. The fire took the part of her face I'd have recognized in a blink, so what's left could be my wife or a stranger—I can't tell which.

A cold weight sits on my chest and won't lift. It isn't her. It's not Manon. There's no version of the world where she stops existing and I keep going, so this fear is irrational. I know this, yet it doesn't help.

What kills me is that I can't check. She made me promise. If I ever loved her, she said, I wouldn't try. I called every man off her the day she walked out. This is the one thing I've given her instead of taken. So she's out there and I don't know where. Could be where she used to live, but I don’t check. That door is shut to me now.

She's fine. She's asleep somewhere I don't own, alive, nowhere near me.

I take the woman’s left hand first and press my thumb into the base of the fingers, feeling for the ridge a blade leaves after enough years. Nothing. Of course nothing, she's right-handed, the callus would be on the other one. So I turn the right hand over, the one that would tell me for certain, and the palm's burned down to nothing. There's nothing left to feel.

I reach for the other hand again, and my arm catches the tray. Everything goes off it and onto the floor. Scalpels, forceps, the lot.

I leave them there.

That's how I know I've lost it. Ask anyone who's watched me straighten a picture in a house that’s not even mine. My mother calls it a disorder. I call it standards. I have never once in my life left anything on the floor, and I leave it there now.

I use the voice command to make the call. Rafe answers fast for the hour.

"It's four o'clock," he says.

"Is it her?"

"Is what her?"

"Woman on my table. No name yet. She shouldn't have been where she was, so don't call me stupid for thinking it. I need to know where Manon is. Now. Tonight."

"I won't call you stupid."

"I'm not in the mood, Rafe. Tell me."

He's choosing his words. I can hear it.

"Laszlo." Careful. "You promised."