"Brexit" came about in part because its propagators kept insisting to domestic voters that European membership imposed on Britain a lot of fussy regulation that it might be better, richer, nobler in sloughing off. This was true and it was false. Construction in Britain is among those industries subject to much fiddly and costly regulation—but many of these are safety laws, in place to protect society at large and in particular society’s voiceless and vulnerable. Much building regulation memorializes some avoidable tragedy from the past, some other complacency that led to some other Grenfell.

It would emerge later that well over 100 tower blocks and buildings around Britain had been clad in materials that, like those used at Grenfell, failed basic fire-safety tests. There is now an effort to peel the flammable skin from these buildings, but it has not been quick work. Wherever such de-cladding gets under way, there usually remains a population of residents still living inside—closing their eyes, just imagining it.

4. Fully Developed Stage

Oluwaseun Talabi, back inside his apartment: "So this is how…" He looked at his partner and he looked at his daughter and he thought: "Wow." He no longer believed they would get out.

A student on the eighth floor got out—along with an aunt he lived with, and all of the neighbors from his floor—because he was awake and able to rouse them when the fire started. ("PlayStation saved your life," he would later say.) A man on the 16th was telephoned by a neighbor and told: "Get out." He wrapped a towel around his face and ran. More than 600 emergency calls were recorded from inside Grenfell Tower on June 14, and in those calls made before 2:47 A.M., many residents were told to remain in their apartments. After that time, according to a subsequent BBC investigation, "stay put" was abandoned and the advice to residents became to flee, however possible. A father of two told his wife and daughters before they began their descent: "There is no turning back." After leading his own wife and daughter to safety, a resident from the 15th floor couldn't shake a feeling he'd left something important behind. "My soul is there in that building," he later told people. "I don't think my soul is with me here—it's there."

David Badillo's sister, Jane, in the morning: "Are you okay?"

She sent the message to her brother by text, having just learned about the fire on the news. It was 7 A.M. Badillo was still at Grenfell, which would continue to burn, fitfully, into the afternoon and evening of June 14. The first-responding firefighters had been there for six hours. They were about to be sent home. Badillo replied: "Bit numb."

"Love you."

"Love you."

A few minutes later, Badillo messaged his sister again, to ask what they were saying on the news. How many people? Jane said five was the confirmed number so far. Badillo wrote: "It's much more than that."

Jane Badillo shared the above messages with me, and agreed to a limited interview, on the condition that I made it clear it was her decision to contribute to my reporting, and not her brother's. Since June 14 it has been difficult for the wider public to grasp, exactly, what individual ﬁreﬁghters went through that night at Grenfell Tower; most rank-and-file first responders have been banned from talking to the media, until the investigations into the fire have been completed. But Jane had been concerned about the psychological impact of the disaster on her brother and his colleagues. She suspected they were bottling up quite a lot. Badillo was, and one night, while the siblings were talking, it all came pouring out—what had happened to him immediately after the fire. When Badillo and the other firefighters had been relieved, they were sent for a cup of tea, sent to be debriefed, sent home. Badillo had ridden his bike in before his shift, he told Jane, and now he rode it home, the smoldering tower still in view for some of the route. When he got back to his wife and his baby daughter, Badillo tried to sleep, but he couldn't. He told his sister he ended up reading about Grenfell on his phone, and while scrolling through his Facebook feed he saw messages from a pair of old friends, brothers named Carlos and Manfred Ruiz, whom he'd been close to ever since the trio worked together as lifeguards at the swimming pool by the tower. The Ruiz brothers were searching for their 12-year-old niece, who hadn't been seen since the start of the fire. Badillo talked to them on the telephone, and they said the girl had lived on the 20th floor. Her name was Jessica.