Ash Wednesday, Every Day

The first time he kills me, I don’t see his face.

The fourteenth time, I recognise his cologne, cedar and something burnt, two full seconds before the blade.

The forty-first time, I turn around.

But I should tell you about the Wednesday first, because I know it better than I have ever known anything. Better than my own handwriting. Better than my father’s.

It begins at ten past six, with the radiator knocking twice in the wall like someone who has forgotten the password. Rain on the skylight. The bakery downstairs putting its first trays in, the whole building smelling of yeast and scorched sugar. My phone on the nightstand says WEDNESDAY in small grey capitals, and beneath it sits the reminder I set a lifetime ago: Ashes, 7am. Don’t be a coward.

I have not been a coward in a long while. It turns out repetition cures you of almost everything.

At seven I kneel in the fourth pew of St. Lazarus on Coldharbour Street. The new St. Lazarus, the small brick one with the aluminium windows, which Everard Mercer paid for after the old church burned. Father Anselm has a head cold. He sniffs before every blessing. When I reach the rail he presses his thumb into the grey paste in the brass bowl and draws the cross on my forehead, warm from his hand and gritty as river sand, and he says, as he has said forty times, Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

I remember. That’s the trouble.

At eight I let myself into the conservation studio at the top of the Guild building and unwrap the Lazarus ledger from its tissue. It is a parish account book bound in calfskin, eighteen inches by twelve, and it is mostly charcoal. The fire took the fore-edge and a wedge of the spine and baked the rest into a black brick of pages fused like pastry. It sat in a box in the diocesan archive for twelve years. For the anniversary exhibition somebody decided it ought to be saved, and Everard decided the somebody should be me.

Your father’s hand is in there, sweetheart, he said, laying it on my bench like a sleeping animal. Who else could I trust with it?

The book was kept for nineteen years by Thomas Sayre, parish bookkeeper, who died in the vestry of the old church on Ash Wednesday night when the roof came down around him. He was working late. He was always working late. I was twenty and away at university, and the phone rang at four in the morning, and I have hated the smell of wet charcoal ever since, which is a strange thing for a woman to hate when she has made a career of rescuing burnt paper.

On Tuesday night, the night before all of this, I teased the fifth leaf free and slid it under the ultraviolet lamp, and in the margin, in my father’s small backward-leaning hand, the ghost of iron gall ink rose out of the soot like something drowned coming up for air. A column of figures. Two sets of initials. A date. I cried over it. Then, because he was the only person left alive who had loved my father too, I emailed Everard at eleven at night: You won’t believe what came back. Dad’s notes. Come and see Friday.

I didn’t know yet that a letter can be a death warrant. I know a great deal more about paper now.

At ten past four Everard phones, the way he phones every Wednesday. His voice is warm and a little hoarse. He asks what I’ve found. He asks, lightly, whether I’ve shown anyone else. He says, “Friday, then. I’ll bring the good wine,” and “You’re a treasure, Immy, you know that,” and forty times I say, “I know,” and hang up smiling.

At half past eleven I go home to my flat above the bakery. I fill the kettle. It whistles at eleven fifty-one, because the element is old. At eleven fifty-two the last train crosses the viaduct beyond my kitchen window, lit up like a necklace dragged across the dark, and I stand at the glass to watch it, because my father used to lift me onto the counter to watch the trains and I have never grown out of it.

And a man comes up behind me in the dark.

The first time, I felt a hand over my mouth and a cold, precise pressure under my ribs, almost gentle, almost like being told a secret. Then the kettle was screaming and the floor was warm and very far away, and I woke at ten past six to the radiator knocking.

The third time, I didn’t go home. I slept in the studio with the door chained, and he came up the fire escape at eleven fifty-two, because apparently it doesn’t matter which window, only that I’m standing near one. The seventh time I rang the police at noon and told them a man was going to kill me at midnight, and a kind young constable sat in my kitchen drinking tea, and the man killed him first. I never did that again. The ninth time I took a train to the coast, and I was on the platform at Marsh Lane at eleven fifty-two, and I felt the hand.

The fourteenth time, I smelled him. Cedar and something burnt. Like a church after the candles go out.

After twenty I stopped running and started studying him. I learned his weight on my floorboards and which board creaks. I learned that he always uses his left hand for my mouth, and that just before, his thumb rests for half a second on the ash on my forehead, as though he’s reading it. I learned that it doesn’t hurt much if you don’t fight, and that it hurts terribly if you do.

The fortieth time, I felt his breath catch, once, before the blade.

So the forty-first time, I turn around.

He’s younger than I expected, and I have had a long time to expect. Thirty-something. Dark hair grown too long and pushed back with his fingers, a jaw that wants a razor, a coat the colour of wet slate. Tired in a way that sits deep in the bones, the kind sleep doesn’t reach. And on his forehead, a smudge of ash: the same thumb-drawn cross I’ve been wearing every Wednesday for what feels like a year.

The knife is low in his right hand, turned flat to slip between ribs. His left hand is lifted toward the place my mouth should have been.

He hesitates.

He has never hesitated before.

“You’re supposed to be facing the window,” he says, low. His voice is rough, as if he doesn’t use it much.

“I’ve been facing the window forty times.” My voice doesn’t shake. I’ve had practice. “I’d like to see who keeps doing this.”

His grip on the knife loosens by a fraction. “You remember.”

“Every time. Don’t you?”

Behind me the kettle is still shrieking on the hob, and neither of us moves to it.

The look on his face is answer enough. Not guilt. Something worse. Recognition. He looks at me the way I look at a page coming up under the lamp: as though he’d been certain there was nothing left in it, and there is.

We sit on my kitchen floor until midnight comes, the knife on the tiles between us like a third person neither of us wants to acknowledge. I turned the kettle off. His knees simply seemed to give, and he slid down the cupboard door, and I sat down opposite because my own legs had begun, very belatedly, to shake.

His name is Cassius. He gives me that much, and then nothing for a long time.

Up close he smells exactly as I knew he would. Under the cedar, woodsmoke, or the memory of it, caught in the wool of his coat. His hands are scarred across both palms, old shiny scars that pull when he flexes his fingers. He sees me looking and closes them.

“Where do you wake up?” I ask.

“The Saint Christopher Motor Lodge on the ring road. Room nine. Twenty to six.” He says it like a man reciting the stations of the cross. “There’s an envelope on the nightstand with your photograph in it. Half the fee. The other half on Thursday.”

“And then you go to mass.”

His eyes lift. Grey, the grey of the ash. “Back row. Every Ash Wednesday for twelve years.”

“I’ve never seen you.”

“People don’t. That’s the job.”

“Why St. Lazarus?”

He doesn’t answer that. He looks at the knife instead. “I tried to stop,” he says at last. “The sixth time. I stayed in the room at the Saint Christopher, and I came to myself at eleven fifty on your fire escape with the blade already out and no memory of the stairs.” His jaw works. “The day remembers what I chose on the first one. It holds me to it. Tonight you turned around, and it was like a hand letting go of my collar.”

“Who paid you?”

“I don’t know. I never know. There’s a broker. Clients stay behind a curtain. It’s cleaner for everyone.”

“Cleaner,” I say, and he has the grace to look away.

I should hate him. I’ve had forty Wednesdays to practise hating him, and I find that I’m too tired, and too curious, and too lonely. Nobody else in the world knows what today is. Only the man who ends it.

“Maybe the loop isn’t a punishment,” I say, as the clock on the cooker ticks toward twelve. “Maybe it’s waiting for you to choose something else.”

He looks at me for a long time. I watch him think it and not dare to believe it. Then he picks up the knife and slides it, handle first, across the floor to me.

The clock strikes midnight.

The floor tilts. There is a sound like a page being turned by an enormous hand.

I wake at ten past six to the radiator knocking.

I lie there and let the rain fall on the skylight and I cry for the first time since this began, great ugly heaving sobs, because I had believed it. For one second on that floor I had believed it.

At seven I kneel in the fourth pew of St. Lazarus with my eyes swollen, and Father Anselm sniffs and presses his thumb to my forehead, and when I go back to my seat a man slides in beside me smelling of cedar and something burnt, with a fresh grey cross above his tired eyes.

“It didn’t work,” Cassius says, very quietly, looking straight ahead at the altar.

“No.”

He’s quiet through the Agnus Dei. Then: “Then we try something else.”

Something else, on the forty-second Wednesday, is a man sitting at my kitchen table at a quarter to midnight with his coat still on, turning a mug of cold tea in his scarred hands and not killing me.

We have spent the day together because neither of us could think what else to do. He walked me to the studio and sat on a stool by the door while I worked, silent as furniture. He watched me separate the fifth leaf, and when I slid it under the lamp and my father’s figures rose out of the black, he leaned in so close I could feel the warmth of his cheek near mine.

“What does it say?”

“I don’t know yet. Numbers. Initials. S.C. and L.M.” I glanced at him. “Why?”

“No reason,” he said, and went back to his stool, and I noticed that his hands had closed again.

Now the kettle whistles at eleven fifty-one. I don’t get up. I don’t go to the window. Cassius goes very still, head tilted, listening.

“Crewe always has a second,” he says. “I’ve never needed one.”

“A second what?”

The window explodes inward.

I remember glass in the air, glittering like thrown sugar. A woman on the fire escape in a yellow rain jacket, chewing gum, a pistol held in both hands with the lazy competence of someone holding a hairdryer. I remember Cassius moving faster than I knew a person could move, and I remember that it wasn’t fast enough. The first shot takes me in the chest and sits me down on the tiles. The woman in yellow says, cheerfully, “Sorry, Cass, you know how it is,” and then the kettle is screaming and Cassius’s hands are on me, pressing, pressing, and his face above mine is not the face of a man who kills people for money. It is the face of a man watching a house burn.

I wake at ten past six to the radiator knocking.

Her name is Hester Pell, and over the next thirty Wednesdays she kills me eleven times.

We learn her the way I learned Cassius. She comes if he hasn’t telephoned the broker by half past eleven to say he’s in position. She comes up the fire escape, or through the bakery, or down through the skylight in a shower of rain. If we go to the coast, she finds us at Marsh Lane. If Cassius stops her, and he does, more than once, with a violence I watch without looking away, midnight takes us anyway, and in the morning she is alive again and chewing gum somewhere in the city, and so am I.

The broker’s name is Simon Crewe, and he sells rare books from a narrow shop on Pilgrim Lane that smells of leather rot and pipe tobacco. Cassius came to him at seventeen, he tells me, out of the last of a long line of care homes, a boy who could fight and couldn’t read well and needed a bed. Crewe gave him the bed above the shop and taught him to read on Trollope, and taught him, a few years later, to do other things.

“He called it being a good instrument,” Cassius says. We’re on the pier at Marsh Lane on the forty-eighth Wednesday, eating chips out of paper at four in the afternoon because I found out he had never once seen the sea. He stands at the rail with his collar up and looks at the grey water heaving itself at the pilings as though it has personally offended him. “A knife doesn’t choose. The hand chooses. You don’t blame the knife.”

“And you believe that.”

“I did.” He turns a chip in his fingers. “It was a very comfortable thing to believe.”

I teach him paper, because it is the only thing I know that is worth teaching. I show him how to hold a leaf to the light and read its chain lines like a palm, how paper remembers every flood it ever survived in a tide mark, how you can never make a damaged thing new but you can make it stable, which is better, because stable things can be read. He listens with his whole body, and I catch myself performing for it, reaching for cleverer words.

The lie I tell myself, I realise on one of those afternoons, is that I chose conservation because I love old things. I chose it because broken paper can’t ask anything of you. You touch it with gloves. It never touches you back.

He teaches me where the ribs part. He stands behind me in my kitchen in the afternoon light, not touching, and guides my hand through the air above his own body, and says here and here, and I learn that the heart sits higher than you think and that most people hold a knife as if it might bite them.

“You hold it like a pen,” he says, almost smiling. It’s the first time I’ve seen anything close to a smile on him, and it’s gone so fast I think I’ve invented it.

I learn that he takes his tea black and too strong, and that when he sleeps, which he does once, on my sofa, for twenty minutes, his right hand stays curled as though a handle is still in it. I learn that he never, ever touches me unless I’m dying.

I notice that more than I should. I notice his mouth when he’s reading, the way it shapes the words without sound, a habit left over from a boy who learned late. I notice the width of his wrists and the scars across his palms, and I want, with a hunger that frightens me, to put my mouth to those scars and ask them where they came from.

On the fifty-first Wednesday he goes to Pilgrim Lane alone and comes back at dusk with blood on his cuffs that isn’t his.

“He’s alive,” he says, before I can ask. He sits at my table and puts his face in his hands. “He’ll wake up tomorrow with all his fingers straight. I told myself that on the way there. I told myself it wouldn’t count.” He lifts his head. His eyes are red. “It counted.”

“What did he say?”

He doesn’t want to tell me. I watch him not want to, and I watch him decide that I’m owed it.

“Mercer,” he says. “Everard Mercer.”

I laugh. I actually laugh, a bright brittle sound, and I tell him Crewe lied to stop the pain, and I tell him Everard held my hand at my father’s funeral, and paid my fees when the scholarship fell short, and sat in the front row at my graduation clapping louder than anyone, and calls me treasure, and I’m shouting by the end, and Cassius just sits there and lets me.

On the fifty-third Wednesday I go to see Everard myself.

His house on Harrowgate Square is all dark wood and lamplight and the ticking of good clocks. He’s delighted. He opens the good wine two days early. He sits me by the fire in the chair that was always mine and asks about my father’s notes, and I watch his hands, because Cassius has taught me to watch hands, and when I say the words ultraviolet and S.C. the glass in his fingers shivers, so that the wine trembles in a thin red ring.

“Oh, Immy,” he says softly, and he gets up and crosses to me and kisses my forehead, right on the ash, the way a father would. When he steps back there’s grey on his lips. “You always did work too hard.”

He puts me in a taxi at half past eleven himself. He pays the driver. He waves from the steps.

Hester Pell is waiting at the rank on Coldharbour Street where the taxi lets me out. I don’t even hear the shot. I’m on the wet pavement looking at the neon of the kebab shop wobbling in a puddle, and then Cassius is there, skidding on his knees through the rain, and he gathers me against his chest with his hand pressed hard over the hole in me.

“No,” he says. “No, no. Look at me. Imogen. Look at me.”

It’s the first time he has said my name.

“He knew,” I say. There’s blood in my mouth; it tastes of pennies. “He kissed me.”

“I know. I know, love. Stay.” His forehead drops to mine. Ash to ash. His whole body is shaking. “Stay a little longer. Don’t go where I can’t follow.”

“You always follow,” I tell him, and I think I’m smiling. “Every morning.”

The last thing I feel is his mouth against my hairline. Not a kiss, exactly. A breath held there, as if he could keep me in by covering the place the soul goes out.

After the taxi rank, something between us comes unstitched.

He’s in the pew beside me the next morning, but he doesn’t look at me, and when Father Anselm’s thumb comes away from his forehead his eyes close as if he has been struck. He walks me to the studio and doesn’t sit on the stool. He stands at the window with his back to me, and I can feel him the whole day, the way you feel a storm in your fillings.

Everard telephones at ten past four. Forty-odd times I have said I know to that voice. This time I sit on the studio floor and let it ring, and Cassius crosses the room and sits down next to me, not touching, a careful inch of air between his shoulder and mine, and when the phone falls silent I put my head on his arm and weep for a man who is still alive.

Days of that. Wednesdays of it. Grief is strange in a loop: it doesn’t heal, because there’s no time for scar tissue, but it wears smooth, like a step.

On the seventy-third Wednesday, it is raining so hard the gutters on Coldharbour Street are running like rivers, and I don’t go to the studio. I don’t go to mass either. I lie in bed and listen to the radiator knock and think, very clearly, that I have died fifty-two times and not once been kissed.

He comes to find me at half past seven, soaked through, and stands dripping in my doorway with his knuckles raised to knock on a door that’s already open.

“You weren’t there,” he says. “I thought…” He stops. His hair is plastered to his forehead, and his ash has run in the rain, a grey tear down one temple.

“Come in,” I say. “Shut the door.”

I make him take his coat off. I make him sit at the kitchen table in a towel while his shirt hangs over the radiator, and I see, for the first time, how much of him is scar. A white seam over one hip. A starburst under the collarbone.

I sit down across from him and my heart is going like the train on the viaduct.

“I want to ask you something,” I say, “and I want you to know you can say no.”

He goes very still, the way he did before Pell came through the window.

“I want you to touch me,” I say. “Not because I’m dying. I want to know what your hands are like when nobody’s bleeding.”

For a long time he doesn’t move. The rain throws itself at the skylight. When he speaks his voice is so low I have to lean in.

“I’ve had my hands on you forty-one times,” he says. “Not one of them was yours to give. I don’t know how to have that and then have this.”

“I’m giving it now.”

“Imogen.” My name in his mouth is a thing with weight. “You could wake up tomorrow and hate that you did.”

“I wake up every morning,” I say, “and I’ve had seventy-two of them to work out what I want. It’s you. I’m asking. You can say no, and I’ll make you toast, and we’ll never mention it.”

He looks at me, and there’s the thing I saw on the forty-first night, the page coming up under the lamp.

“Yes,” he says. “God help me. Yes.”

He stands. He comes round the table, and then he doesn’t do anything at all. He stands in front of my chair with his hands at his sides and waits, and I understand that he’s going to wait for every single thing. So I take his wrist, and I turn his hand over, and I put my mouth to the scar in his palm.

He makes a sound I will hear in my sleep for the rest of my life, however long that is.

The kiss, when it comes, is not what I expected. I expected hunger. It’s closer to reverence, slow and almost frightened, his mouth learning mine as if it were written in a language he’d only ever seen in pieces. He tastes of black tea and rain. I pull him down by the back of his neck and the reverence breaks a little, and his hand comes up and cradles my jaw, and his thumb brushes the smudged ash on my forehead, the same half second he used to take before the blade, and this time what comes after is his mouth on my throat.

“Tell me,” he breathes against my pulse. “Tell me what’s all right.”

“All of it. Bed. Now.”

In my bedroom the light is the colour of pewter. He undresses me like I undo a fused text block, a leaf at a time, asking with his eyes before each button, and I say yes so many times it stops sounding like a word. When I’m bare he kneels at the edge of the bed and looks, just looks, and his hands hover a quarter inch above my skin the way they hovered over his own ribs when he taught me where the heart is, and I have never in my life been so naked, and I have never wanted anything the way I want those hands to land.

“Cassius.”

“I’m here.”

“Touch me.”

They land. They’re warm, and rough where the scars are, and they move over me as if he is memorising a route he’ll have to walk blind. Over my hip. The dip of my waist. The curve beneath my breast, where he pauses, and I know exactly which place he’s thinking of, and I cover his hand with mine and press it flat over my heart so he can feel it hammering.

“Alive,” I tell him. “Feel that. That’s yours too.”

He bends his head and puts his mouth where his hand was, and then lower, and lower, and when he settles between my thighs he looks up at me once, a question, and I push my fingers into his wet hair and answer it. He’s patient. He is so patient it undoes me, a slow devotion, his tongue unhurried and exact, reading what makes my breath stutter and returning to it until I’m arched off the sheets with my heels dug into the mattress and his name coming out of me in pieces. When I break it’s like the moment a fused page finally lifts: a sudden give, a rush of air into a place that had been sealed for years. I shake with it. He holds my hips and stays with me through all of it, and presses his cheek to the inside of my thigh afterward, breathing as hard as I am.

I drag him up. I get his belt open with clumsy hands, and he helps, and then he’s bare against me, heavy and hot and trembling with holding himself back.

“Still yes?” he asks, braced over me, and his voice cracks down the middle.

“Still yes. Always yes. Come here.”

He fits himself to me and pushes in slowly, so slowly, watching my face the whole way, and the stretch of him steals the breath out of my lungs. We both go still when he’s fully inside. His forehead drops to mine. Ash to ash again, but warm this time, and moving.

“Imogen,” he says, like a man saying a prayer he’d forgotten he knew.

We move together. At first it’s careful, and then I wrap my legs around him and dig my nails into the scarred plain of his back and tell him not to be careful, and he isn’t. The bed knocks the wall in time with the radiator. The rain roars. He drives into me with a deep rolling rhythm that builds and builds, one arm under my shoulders holding me close as if the whole world might try to take me out from under him, and his other hand finds where we’re joined and circles there until I come apart a second time, clenching around him, crying out into his shoulder. He follows me over with a raw, wrecked sound, my name again, pressed into my hair.

Afterwards he doesn’t let go. He lies half on me with his face in my neck and his heart slamming against my breast, and I realise, stroking the back of his head, that he’s crying. Silently. The way I suspect he learned to do everything.

We don’t leave the bed all day. We make love again in the early dark with the streetlight coming orange through the blind, slower, me above him this time, his scarred hands on my hips guiding nothing, only holding on, his eyes fixed on my face as though I’m the last train and he doesn’t want to miss a single lit window. We eat toast in bed. I read him the chain lines of my own skin. It is the best day of my life, and it is Wednesday, and I would live it a thousand times.

At twenty to midnight, with the kettle filled and not yet boiling, I lift his right hand and kiss the scar across the palm and ask him where it came from.

I feel him turn to stone under me.

“Don’t,” he says.

“Cassius. I’ve had my mouth on it. I think I’m allowed to know.”

He sits up. He puts his feet on the floor and his back to me, and in the orange light the scars on his back look like a map of somewhere nobody should live. When he tells me, he tells it to the wall.

“I was twenty-two,” he says. “Crewe gave me a can of petrol and an address and said the building would be empty after ten. An insurance job. Nobody hurt. I believed him because I wanted a bed and he had one.” He breathes. “I did it at eleven. It went up faster than I thought. And then there was a light in a window at the side. In the vestry. A man’s shape behind the glass.”

The room goes very quiet. Even the rain seems to stop to listen.

“I tried the door. The handle was so hot it took the skin off. I couldn’t hold it. I couldn’t get it open.” He opens his hands on his knees, palms up, and looks at them. “I ran. I’ve gone to that church every Ash Wednesday since, and sat in the back, and let the priest tell me I’m dust. The first night of this, when I opened the envelope, it said Imogen Sayre. I knew the name. I knew it.”

“And you took it anyway.” My voice sounds like somebody else’s, somebody very calm, very far away.

“I told myself if I refused, Crewe would give it to Pell, and Pell is cruel, and I’d be quick.” He finally turns his head, and his face is wet and terrible. “I told myself it was a mercy. I’m the knife. I’m always just the knife.”

My father. My father’s shape behind the glass.

I think of forty-one hands over my mouth. I think of those hands on my body an hour ago. I think of the scar I kissed, and that it was made on the door my father was on the other side of, and the bile rises so fast I barely make it to the bathroom.

When I come out he’s dressed, standing in my kitchen, not reaching for me.

“Get out,” I say.

He goes. He doesn’t argue. He leaves the door open, as if he knows I’ll want to hear him on the stairs, and I do. I count every step.

The kettle whistles at eleven fifty-one. At eleven fifty-two I walk to the window, and for the first time in seventy-three Wednesdays I face it on purpose, the last train dragging its lit necklace over the viaduct, my father’s hands lifting me up to see.

I hear the fire escape creak. I hear a woman chewing gum.

I don’t turn around.

I stop going to mass. I don’t want his shape in the back row.

I go to the studio instead, every Wednesday, and I do the only thing I have ever trusted: I work. The ledger forgets every night. I don’t. By the eightieth Wednesday I can separate the first five leaves before nine; by the eighty-fourth I’m through the tenth by lunch. Some nights I go home and wait at the window at eleven fifty-two for the fire escape to creak, and it doesn’t. I wake at midnight instead, with the page-turn lurch, whole. I tell myself Pell has lost interest. I don’t let myself wonder why.

On the eighty-sixth Wednesday, at a quarter past three, I lift the last legible leaf and put it under the lamp, and my father speaks.

Ash Wednesday. L.M. has moved the whole of the building fund through Halloran Holdings, £212,000. Cash to S.C., £4,000, marked “roof”. There is nothing wrong with the roof. Told Fr. Anselm after evening mass. Staying late to copy all of it. If I am wrong, God forgive me. If I am right, God forgive him.

I sit with that until the light goes.

Then I walk to St. Lazarus, and I find Father Anselm in the vestry with his head cold and a box of tissues, and I lay my photographs of the page on his desk, and I watch an old man’s face fall in.

“He told me,” Anselm says. “Thomas. That very night, after mass. I said he must be mistaken. Everard was on the diocesan board. Everard was a friend.” He presses a tissue to his eyes. “At two in the morning, a young man came to the rectory door. The skin was gone from both his palms. He said there was a man inside, he had tried the door, he couldn’t. Then he ran. I told the police. The next week Everard came to see me with an architect’s drawings for a new church, and the detective in charge took early retirement in Spain, and I said nothing. Twelve years I have said nothing.”

“The ash,” I say. My mouth has gone dry. “Where does the ash come from?”

He looks at me strangely. “The palms from last year. And this year, for the anniversary, I burned the last pew they salvaged from the old church. I wanted…” He spreads his hands. “I wanted the dust to come home.”

Remember that you are dust. Twelve years ago that fire took my father and made Cassius what he is. This morning a priest with a guilty heart pressed its ashes into our foreheads, and for eighty-six days neither of us has been allowed to forget.

I go home at half past eleven. I don’t fill the kettle. I climb out of my kitchen window onto the fire escape in the rain, and I look up, and he is there.

He’s sitting on the iron steps above my window with the knife across his knees and a split lip, and on the flat roof behind him a woman in a yellow rain jacket lies face down and breathing.

“Every night?” I ask.

“Since the seventy-fourth.” He doesn’t come down. “You told me to get out. You never told me to let her have you.”

I climb up and sit on the step below him, rain running down my neck. For a long time we just breathe.

“I don’t forgive you,” I say. “I want to be very clear about that. I don’t think it’s mine to give. It was his.”

“I know.”

“But I’ve read everything my father wrote in that book, and he wrote God forgive him about Everard, and he would have written it about a boy with a petrol can too, because that was the kind of fool he was.” I turn and look up at him. “I’m choosing you anyway. With my eyes open. That’s worse than forgiveness. You’ll have to live with it.”

His face does something I have no word for, not in any language.

“Come to mass,” I say, as the kettle stays silent and the clock ticks toward twelve. “Sit next to me. We have work to do.”

The next Wednesday, he kneels beside me at the rail, and Anselm’s thumb shakes as it marks us, and afterwards Cassius walks me home through the wet streets without a word, and at my door I take the front of his coat in both fists.

“I want you,” I say. “I’m angry and I’m grieving and I want you, and I want to be the one who decides every single thing. Is that all right?”

He looks down at my hands on his coat. “Anything you want. Everything you want.”

“Then say yes.”

“Yes.”

This time I undress him. I push him down on my bed in the grey morning light and I take my time over every scar, my mouth on the white seam at his hip, the starburst under his collarbone, the ruined palms, and I say this is mine now over each one, and he lies there and shudders and lets me. When I take his wrists and press them to the pillow above his head, I watch his eyes, and I ask. He nods. “Out loud,” I tell him. “Yes,” he says, hoarse. “Keep them there,” I say, and he does, knuckles white on the headboard, while I kiss down his chest and stomach and take him in my mouth, slow, relentless, until his hips lift off the bed and he’s saying my name like a man drowning and begging me not to stop and begging me to, both at once.

I don’t let him finish. I climb over him and sink down onto him inch by inch, and the sound he makes goes straight through me. I set the pace. I make it cruelly slow. I brace my hands flat on his chest where his heart is going wild and I move on him, rising and falling, watching his face open like a book with a broken spine, every page showing.

“Look at me,” I tell him, as he told me on the wet pavement. “Cassius. Look at me.”

He looks. He doesn’t look away once, not when I grind down harder and faster and the pleasure winds tight and bright inside me, not when I reach between us and bring myself there with his eyes on my fingers, not when I come around him shouting at the skylight. Only when I lean down and say against his mouth, “Now. Let go now. Touch me,” does he break his hands free of the headboard and grip my hips and pull me down onto him, once, twice, and spill inside me with his face pressed to my breast and his whole body shaking like a struck bell.

After, lying tangled in the damp sheets, he says into my hair, “If there’s ever a Thursday, I’m walking into Coldharbour Road police station. The fire. Your father. All of it.”

I close my eyes. I knew he would say it. I think I’d have stopped loving him if he hadn’t. “I know.”

“That’s what it costs.”

“I know,” I say again, and this time, for the first time, I know is not a lie.

It takes four more Wednesdays to learn the shape of the last one.

If I send my father’s pages to the police, Everard knows within the hour; he has friends everywhere, and Pell comes at nine. If Cassius kills Crewe, Everard hires Pell himself. If Cassius kills Everard, which he offers once, very quietly, on the ninetieth Wednesday, midnight turns the page and it is Wednesday again, as if the day had shrugged. The loop does not want a body. It has had ninety days of me.

So on the ninety-first Wednesday we don’t try to win. We try to tell the truth.

At noon Father Anselm sits in his vestry and speaks into my phone about a young man with no skin on his palms. At three Cassius walks into the shop on Pilgrim Lane, lays the envelope of money on the counter, and tells Simon Crewe he is finished; Crewe sighs and says that is a shame, because the client has decided to attend personally, he’s grown sentimental, and Cassius walks out with every word of it recorded in his coat pocket and Crewe’s fingers unbroken.

At ten past four Everard telephones, as he always does, and this time I pick up.

“Immy, sweetheart. What did you find?”

“Everything,” I say. “I know, Everard.” And I hang up, and my hands don’t shake at all.

At six I send all of it, the ledger photographs, the priest, the broker, to Priya Anand at the Courier, who has been circling Everard Mercer for a decade.

At eleven fifty-one the kettle whistles. At eleven fifty-two I go to the window and face the dark on purpose, the last train dragging its lit necklace over the viaduct, and behind me, in the shadow by my bedroom door, a man who smells of cedar and something burnt does not move.

A key turns in my front door. Of course Everard has a key. He’s had one for twelve years.

At the same moment the fire escape creaks, and Hester Pell comes through the window in a burst of glass and yellow. Cassius hits her side-on before her feet touch the tiles. Her gun goes off. I see him jerk and keep going, and they go into the cupboards together, and there’s a crack like a branch, and Pell screams and then goes quiet. The pistol skitters across the floor and stops at the polished shoes of Everard Mercer, who stands in my doorway in his good camel coat with rain on his shoulders and my father’s funeral in his face.

He picks it up. He points it at me. His hand is trembling so badly the barrel draws small circles.

“You were supposed to be facing the window,” he says, and it is so nearly the first thing Cassius ever said to me that I almost laugh.

Cassius is on his knees between us, one hand clamped to his side, blood coming through his fingers. The knife is in his other hand. I’ve seen him throw. At this distance he wouldn’t miss. I watch him weigh it, and I watch Everard see him weigh it.

“Do it,” Everard says to him, breathless. “Go on. You’ve done worse for less.”

Cassius looks at me. Not at Everard. At me.

Then he lays the knife flat on the tiles and slides it, handle first, across the floor. It stops against my bare foot.

“Your Thursday,” he says. “Your choice.”

I pick it up. I hold it the right way, the way he taught me, not like a pen. Everard’s gun follows me. His eyes are wet.

“Your father would have ruined forty good men over a column of figures,” he says. “I paid for everything you are. I loved you.”

“You paid for it with him,” I say. “It’s gone, Everard. Priya Anand has had the pages since six. Father Anselm. Crewe. You can shoot me. It won’t unprint anything.”

Far away, and then not so far away, sirens begin, rising over the viaduct.

I think of forty-one hands over my mouth. I think of a man’s shape behind hot glass. I think of what I would be, on Thursday, with this in me. Then I walk to the sink and lay the knife in it, gently, the way you lay down a leaf that has taken all day to lift.

“Remember that you are dust,” I tell him.

Everard Mercer looks at me for a long time. Then the gun sags, and he sits down on my kitchen floor in his beautiful coat, among the glass, and puts his face in his hands, and the kettle screams, and the clock on the cooker reaches twelve.

I wait for the tilt. For the enormous hand turning the page.

It doesn’t come.

Twelve oh one. The kettle is still screaming. Cassius is bleeding on my tiles. I’m down beside him with my hands pressed over his, and he is laughing, a cracked astonished sound, with the ash still on his forehead and blood on his teeth. “Imogen,” he says. “Imogen. It’s Thursday.”

The paramedics say the bullet went through clean. The police take Everard and Pell, and take my statement until five, and let me go home, where I fall into bed in my clothes.

I wake at ten past six to the radiator knocking, and my heart stops dead.

Then I see the light. Real light, thin and gold, lying across the skylight where the rain has always been. My phone on the nightstand says THURSDAY in small grey capitals.

Someone knocks at my door.

He’s standing there in a hospital gown under his slate-coloured coat, grey-faced, stitched, having discharged himself against advice. The ash is gone from his forehead. He looks younger without it.

“I’m going to Coldharbour Road at nine,” he says. “I wanted one morning first. If you’ll have me. If you won’t, I’ll wait on the stairs.”

I pull him inside by the lapels.

We’re careful of his side. We’re careful of everything. I ask, and he says yes; he asks, and I say yes; and in the gold light we make love so slowly it feels like a vow being written out by hand, his face above mine unguarded and wet, my fingers laced through his scarred ones on the pillow, because for the first time in ninety-one days the morning is only the morning, and it will not come again, and that is exactly what makes it holy.

At half past eight we walk to the police station together in the sunlight, and at the steps he kisses my forehead, where the ash used to be, and goes in.

HMP Greyfriars smells of floor polish and boiled vegetables, and on Wednesdays the visiting room windows face east.

It is Ash Wednesday again, a year on. Everard Mercer is serving life. Simon Crewe died on remand, and his shop on Pilgrim Lane is a vape shop now. Hester Pell took a deal and then broke it, and is somewhere I will never ask about. Father Anselm gave evidence without a single sniff, then retired to a cottage at Marsh Lane and wrote me a letter that said only: Thank you for making me remember.

Cassius got nine years for the fire. The judge said his confession, and his testimony against Mercer, weighed heavily. I heard only the number, and then the part where he turned in the dock to find my face.

I come on Wednesdays. I will always come on Wednesdays.

I went to seven o’clock mass this morning, and a new young priest pressed his thumb into the brass bowl and drew the cross on my forehead, and I didn’t flinch. Now I sit at the bolted table in the east light, and they bring him in, and he’s thinner, and his hair is short, and there’s a grey smudge above his eyes from the prison chaplain, and he smiles at me, a real one, which I no longer think I’ve invented.

He sits. We’re allowed to hold hands across the table. I turn his over and run my thumb along the scar in his palm, and feel him shiver.

“Remember that you are dust,” he says softly.

“I remember,” I tell him. “Every time.”

Outside, far off beyond the wall, a train crosses a viaduct in broad daylight. It is Wednesday. Tomorrow will be Thursday, and then Friday, and all the ordinary days after, and eight years from now a man who smells of cedar and something burnt will walk out of those gates into the morning, and I’ll be standing there, facing him.