Later, at Homerton University Hospital, Clancy was exhausted. Several members of staff had suggested that she could go home and rest, that her friends were in good hands, but still she continued to sit on one of a collection of chairs just inside the main door. Over the past hours she’d acted as the information hub for the families of Will, Asila, Monty and even Renée. Now her energy was leaching away and it was dawning on her that she had no obvious place to go. She couldn’t make her tired mind work around the logistics of booking a hotel room online now it was past midnight on Wednesday, in case it resulted in her getting a room for Thursday night, not tonight.

She needed a hotel that had a night staff so she could telephone and sort it out person to person. She kept shying away from the option a bruised, battered and subdued Will had given her, which was to use her key to the apartment and sleep there.

Maybe she’d just continue sitting here instead, not making the decision.

Her mind drifted. Aaron had been trying to contact her. She’d read his text several times but by the time she’d finished talking to Will’s parents, who were in a different time zone on holiday and were trying to change flights, and reassuring Asila’s husband, who was haunting the hospital corridors in tears and seemed totally incapable of retaining any information the nursing staff gave him, it had already been late. She was reluctant to risk waking Aaron with a call so had left a text: I’m OK but Will, Renée and some of my erstwhile colleagues have been hurt in a car crash, some quite badly. She felt unequal to the task of explaining why she’d travelled to be with Will – she’d been wondering about it herself and her only conclusion had been that he’d caught her at a low moment and provided proof that there was somewhere she was needed and wanted – so she just added: I’ll be in contact. xxx

While she’d been sitting here, she’d thought of Aaron a lot: his ready smile, the way he moved, the heat of him when he made love to her. The odd mixture of reliability and free-spiritedness that was him, living in his cottage on the clifftop.

Was there a place for her in his life? Or in Nelson’s Bar at all?

She’d been careful not to be presumptuous about moving in on his space but he’d apparently agreed to share his home with Lee and Daisy. They were his family and she was not, and she was trying not to feel it was a reflection of the scale of her importance to him, but it was making her consider alternatives. The Roundhouse was out; the B&B was out. A house in Thornham or Titchwell, just a few miles from Nelson’s Bar, would be her best option. It would be an easy drive to perform her caretaking duties, or they could advertise for someone to take over at the end of the summer. Clancy could get a different job or throw herself into another business. Then, if things didn’t work out with Aaron, they wouldn’t be falling over each other in the village or having to deal with each other at Roundhouse Row.