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‘I’m going to go home and prep for the session,’ I say. ‘I need some thinking time.’

But when I get home I just pace and look at a blank Word doc. I can’t do this. I have no questions. No thoughts. Nothing. My mind is blank. I feel sick. I look at my clothes. I think of what Hillary said. No one cares about my part. Xavier is the star. I need to facilitate that. Fade into the background. I will wear all black, an oversize black shirt and black pants.

Okay, now to the questions. I need to start with the easy stuff. His books.

I go to get the copies I read and annotated earlier this year, but I can’t find either of them. Did Xavier take them? Or maybe he threw them away. Maybe he burned them. I can see James suggesting that.

It’s fine. I can remember them. I can remember his words.

I start writing questions, basic inane questions, hoping something better will come to mind. I hunt up old interviews and podcasts, and listen. I try not to let the sound of his voice do things to me, but it does. He sounds younger, sure of himself in interviews about The Bird House and then less so in his interviews about The Deep. I listen to an interview where he is so vulnerable that I want to reach through my headphones and hold his hand.

I’m still sitting with that feeling, trying to push away the urge to relisten to the interview, when there’s a knock at the door.

I know who it is. I know that knock.

I get up and go to the door.

Xavier is standing there.

‘Is now an okay time?’ he asks, rubbing his neck.

‘Sure. Come in,’ I say.

He walks into the lounge room, and we look at each other and then we both look away quickly. It’s too much, being together in this house again. I should have gone to Hillary’s house. Neutral ground. Instead we’re on the exact ground we last had sex. Sex ground. The literal sex couch. Also the ground where we broke up. Where I told him to leave. The ground where everything happened.

‘So,’ I say, sitting down on the couch and picking up my laptop. ‘I thought we could do half the session on your books and how you feel about them now with some distance from publication, and then the second half on why you stopped writing and how you started again.’

He looks at the space on the couch next to me, then at the high-backed armchair where he used to sit—the Jane Austen Reading Chair, he called it once. I bought a plump burnt-orange cushion, and I can see he has opinions on it, but he’s not going to say them. He sits down on the floor and rifles through his bag.

‘Does that sound okay?’ I say.

I wish we had one of those barriers between us they have in prisons, where we are speaking on a phone and looking at each other through a bulletproof piece of plastic.

‘Yep, sounds good,’ he says.

‘Do you know where my copies of your books are?’ I ask. ‘I need the notes I made.’

‘Yes. I have them.’ He opens his backpack and pulls them out, along with his laptop and his glasses. I want to ask why he took my copies of his books, but I opt for a safer question instead.

‘When did you start wearing glasses?’

‘I was writing a lot again, and my eyes were hurting. I only got them last week.’ He puts them on and then takes them off again, handling them in the self-conscious way of someone new to glasses.

‘Well, they look good.’

‘Thank you.’

He stretches himself out on the floor, leans on an elbow and looks up at me, and I am transported back to all the nights we spent here together. A deep ache is forming in my chest. God, I have missed him.

I clear my throat. ‘So I thought we could make the writer’s-block program stuff funny. Keep it pretty light.’

‘Okay,’ he says.

‘You’re going to give me more than one-word answers when we’re on stage, right?’

He meets my gaze, says nothing for a moment, and then nods. ‘Don’t worry, I know how to please a crowd.’

‘Is there anything you don’t want me to mention?’