Nelson’s Bar. She’d been here only once before, for the week of Alice’s wedding – or not-wedding, as it turned out – but Roundhouse Row was just as she remembered it. Alice and Lee had lived in number one, the Roundhouse itself, a cylinder of white and red chalk stone with an occasional accent of flint, wearing its conical terracotta roof like a hat with windows.

Clancy climbed from the car and stretched. The salt-scented breeze filled her lungs so easily that it was as if a giant rubber band had dropped from around her chest.

She clicked open the garden gate and fished out the Roundhouse key. It turned smoothly and her footsteps echoed on worn red quarry tiles as she stepped inside the enclosed porch and then through the inner door. She paused to take in the ground floor, its central staircase cradled by hefty oak beams and posts.

Almost as the front door clunked shut behind her she caught the opening of the door in the opposite wall. ‘Hello?’ called a man’s voice, and Aaron De Silva rounded the stairs, dark curls longer than she remembered and tousled around his face, the line of his jaw shaded more heavily with stubble, T-shirt and jeans speckled with grass clippings.

Six-plus years shrank to nothing.

He stopped short. ‘Clancy?’ He sounded stunned.

Silent seconds passed and Clancy was aware of more between them than the empty floor space. One fevered kiss. One blazing row. Years of carefully polite emails.

Aaron blinked. ‘Am I supposed to understand what’s going on? Your last email said you had someone for the caretaker job. Did you feel the need to escort her here personally?’ He glanced behind her, as if expecting to see another person.

She had to strangle a laugh at his almost comical expression of dismay. ‘No.’ She made her voice firm. ‘Because I’m taking the job myself. I need a change of scene.’

His dark brows snapped together. ‘You?’ There was nothing comical about his expression now. It was more … horrified.

The urge to laugh vanished. Instead, Clancy suddenly felt clammy and unsteady. She blinked to clear her vision. Maybe her earlier dream-like sensations had been something to do with a failure to eat today. And possibly yesterday. She swallowed and her voice sank to a whisper. ‘Sorry. I should have checked with you.’ She tried to think of somewhere else she could go but her thoughts refused to co-operate. She’d found herself struggling with decisions recently. That’s what the others at IsVid had said, Monty, Asila, Tracey – even Will. It was the shock. She wasn’t functioning, they’d told her in varying degrees of kindness when she’d risen in the middle of a meeting with a client and gone home. In Monty’s opinion it had constituted ‘a breakdown’ and he’d wanted her to get psychiatric help.

Enraged, she’d snapped a refusal. ‘I simply recognised the reaching of a personal limit. I’ve emailed the client and apologised. They understand.’