No notice had been taken of his words, by the look of things, because she was approaching the bend now, for the first time in twenty years, and it all looked exactly the same. No barriers. No warning signs. Tears smarted in Olivia’s eyes as memories bombarded her. ‘Is he okay? Is he okay?’ she had screamed at the paramedics when they finally came to cut them out of the mangled vehicle. Even though she knew the answer. Even though she’d been lying there beside Aidan in the wreckage and his face had already become quite waxy. Quite cold.

The thing was, only she knew the truth: that he wouldn’t have died if she hadn’t been sitting there next to him. It was all her fault.

She pulled over in the next lay-by and lost herself in a storm of weeping.

Some time later Olivia wiped her puffy red eyes, blew her nose and swigged from an ancient bottle of water that she found in the passenger footwell. Okay. Enough crying. What right did she have to cry when it came to Aidan, anyway?

Planning to head back to the cottage, she started the engine and drove away, but once she was on the other side of town, she realized she was approaching Swanpool, her and Aidan’s favourite beach, a place they had both loved. Perhaps she had the energy for one last stop after all.

The beach was always heaving with tourists in summer, but she and Aidan had gone there loads of times in winter too with their friends, lighting big fires on the sand at night-time and playing music, or breaking into derelict beach huts and telling ghost stories by torchlight. She smiled to herself briefly, recalling how spooky it had been, with the boys surreptitiously making scratching sounds against the wooden boards to unnerve the girls, and how jumpy they had become as a result. A gust of wind had banged the door suddenly, right at the tensest moment of one story, and they’d practically screamed the place down, clutching at each other in hysterical fright.

She would go there again, she decided, slowing so that she wouldn’t miss the turn-off. Remember the summer that Spencer had worked at the ice-cream stand, and had dished out so many freebies to his mates that he’d been sacked within ten days. Remember the warm September night that she and Aidan had come here, just the two of them, for some starlight skinny-dipping, the first and last time she’d ever done such a bold and thrilling thing. Remember—

Shit!