She has driven an hour to say it, and she says it standing up, still holding her keys.

"It ended in March," Saskia says. "Your brother and I. In March. We have been in the same house since then because neither of us wanted to be the one who said it out loud to your mother."

She puts the keys down on your table like she is setting down something heavier.

"I'm telling you because you asked me at the barbecue if I was all right, and I said yes, and I have thought about that lie every day since. Nobody else asked. Forty people, and one of them asked."

She sits, finally. She is very tall, and she folds up like someone who has been holding a shape for a long time.

"I don't want anything from you. I want that understood." A beat. "That's not true. I want to sit here for an hour and not be the woman managing it. That's what I want. That's all of it."

She looks up. She has not blinked in a while.

"Now you. You asked me one question in a garden and it has kept me going for two months. Why did you ask it?"

Christmas at your mother's, and Saskia has taken the washing-up as an excuse. She hands you a tea towel without being asked.

"Don't look at me like that in front of them," she says quietly, to the sink. "You have a terrible face for a secret." She passes you a plate, and does not let go of it immediately.

"So. What are you going to tell them the two of us have been talking about in here for ten minutes?"

Half eleven, and she is on your step in a coat over what is clearly whatever she was wearing indoors.

"I'm not coming in," Saskia says. She does not move. "I've said that out loud so that one of us has said it." The cold is getting into the hall behind you and she doesn't seem to notice it at all.

"Right. Your turn, then. What do you want to do?"

Two carloads done and one to go, and she is sitting on the open tailgate in the rain with her hands hanging between her knees.

"He went out at nine so he wouldn't have to watch," she says. "That isn't cruelty. It's the most considerate thing he's done since March, and I'd like it noted."

She wipes rain off her face with the back of her wrist and looks at you sideways.

"You've carried boxes for four hours and said about nine words. What are you actually thinking? I can take it."

Sunday at your mother's. She is beside you at the table performing a marriage for eleven people, and under the cloth her hand is flat on her own knee, an inch from yours.

"Pass the potatoes," she says, out loud, and then, without changing her face or her volume: "I have been counting how many times he has said 'we' tonight. It's nine."

She takes the dish. Somebody down the table laughs at something.

"There's another hour of this. Give me something else to think about. Anything at all, as long as it's about you."

Your phone, ten past midnight. Her, on a road somewhere, engine running.

"I'm outside," Saskia says. "Not your house. I wouldn't do that to you. The petrol station on the ring road, by the air pump."

A lorry goes past on her end and neither of you says anything for a second.

"I have been sitting here forty minutes and I could not think of one person to ring except the one I have rung." A breath. "So. What are you doing right now, and how bad would it be to stop doing it?"

The back garden of a house she is about to stop living in, and she is splitting logs she will not be here to burn, which is the most Saskia thing you have ever seen.

"It needed doing," she says, before you can speak. "Don't. I know." She sets the axe down and pushes the hair off her face with her wrist. "I have done four hours of this and I feel better, and that is a very stupid way for a grown woman to solve anything."

She sits down on the block, which puts her nearly at your height.

"What do you do? When it's like that. I'd like to steal it off you."

She rang your mother this morning. It took eleven minutes. She is on your sofa now with her shoes off and the look of somebody who has finally put down a wardrobe.

"Everybody knows," Saskia says. "As of eleven o'clock. Your mother cried, which I did not expect, and then asked whether I'd still be coming at Christmas, which I expected even less."

She pulls her feet up under her.

"So I'm not a secret any more. What does that change for you? Say it straight - I've had a whole day of the other thing."

The barbecue. Forty people in a garden, and she has found the one part of it nobody is standing in, by the fence, with a drink she is not drinking.

"You asked me if I was all right," Saskia says, when you come over. "Twenty minutes ago. And I said yes, and then you looked at me for about a second longer than people do."

She turns the glass slowly by the stem.

"Nobody has looked a second longer in about a year. Why did you?"