They spend the rest of the morning under their own glass dome, breathing each other’s air, moving in the warmth of their own microclimate. They lie in bed, legs flung over each other, talking, laughing and remembering: I thought you were annoyed with me that time … But then I caught you looking at me … At first I thought it was just my new haircut … I saw it in your eyes … Felt it, yes … But couldn’t be sure …

That afternoon, the rumbling crashes of a summer storm make Becky so nervous she can’t settle. You have a choice, she says to herself. So she chooses to ignore it. But the thunder rolls and it feels like her heart and stomach are being flattened by heavy stones. You can always do something. So she shuts the windows tight, turns the music up and her phone off. She throws her arms round Adam and they kiss each other.

You have a choice, you can always do something.

Chapter 26

Becky sleeps fitfully, waking near dawn but then quickly falling back into a viscous dream where she is standing at the bottom of a bank of spiked hedgerows, on the hard shoulder of the motorway. An unending stream of lorries and cars pass her at terrifying speed. A man walks towards her holding a breeze-block in his arms. Becky knows that he is coming to smash her brains out, in front of everyone. She cannot move her feet. She screams but no sound comes out. Why does nobody stop? She tries to beg him to spare her. He comes closer, raising the block high above his head.

Only the blow never comes – instead he tosses the block sideways into the nearest lane, where it caves in the windscreen of a family car. The car swerves, clips a van in the passing lane, and spins and flips. Cars, trucks and vans collide, piling up, flinging off their wing mirrors and tyres high up into the air, sending engines spinning across the tarmac like flaming tumbleweeds. Becky stands transfixed. She is alone, watching the vehicles smash and pile, making a pyramid of shattered panels, spilled oil, broken glass. It is like ballet. She finds herself crying because of how beautiful it is.

She comes to, disorientated, in the grey yellow light of early morning.

Maisie will still be asleep and Adam has gone home now, leaving a rumpled and cold space in the bed beside her. She feels afraid and alone and longs for Adam’s warmth and chatter as she senses the dark and silent approach of the many questions she has been trying to stifle.

How should she now think of all that time spent obsessing over Scott’s potions and fashions and the holidays and words that inspired her thoughts, her plans and narrative? If he inspired her Medea film, does that make her passion for the subject somehow less truthful? And what of the last sixteen years?