I drove back down the lanes feeling dazed and disconnected. The late spring sun was low in the sky and dazzling in its intensity. The road shimmered, mirage-like, before me. I pulled the visor down, but it didn’t help much and suddenly I was glad of the searching spotlight, focusing on me, finding me out: looking into every corner of my soul. I pushed the visor up and embraced it. Was he right, Turner? Was Ingrid right? Was I imagining things? Had my mind overcompensated for the numerous times I’d fantasized about Michael dying? And let’s face it, it had been a constant preoccupation. One minute he was stepping off the pavement, half cut, into the path of an oncoming car when – thud. It was all over. The next he was driving too fast – a regular occurrence – and meeting a lamppost head on, as he misjudged a corner. No one else was hurt, obviously, but the car concertinaed and he was killed instantly. I shook my head, gathering myself together. Banishing all those old thoughts. That old life.

Instead, I concentrated on what Turner had said. Sometimes, in times of extreme stress and shock, and after trauma, the mind plays tricks. Distorts the past. The timeline can shift, or, more specifically, lengthen. A minute seems like an hour. Except I knew … I knew … didn’t I? I gripped the wheel feeling – what was that word Imo had taught me? Gaslighted. That was it. She’d used it with reference to her father. It was from a movie of the same name, with Ingrid Bergman and – Cary Grant? The husband who drives his wife insane: planting seeds of doubt, until she questions her own reality. Michael had done it, constantly manipulating me to imagine I was in the wrong, doubting my own memories, my perception of the truth. Jesus Christ, was it happening again? In which case, was it me? Was I the one who misremembered events? Had I deliberately coughed in Michael’s ear every two hours, as he once said I had, intentionally waking him, so that I was afraid to go to sleep (and wasn’t allowed to sleep in the room next door)? I had to pull over suddenly, off the road, on to a grass verge. Was this yet another situation I’d got wrong?