‘Who?’

‘Your other half.’

‘He didn’t do this!’

He obviously didn’t believe her. ‘Kids here?’

‘At my sister-in-law’s.’

‘You going to let me in?’

She could hear her sister’s voice coming from the phone on the table, demanding to know why she was looking at the beamed ceiling. ‘Bridge! Hello! Don’t tell me you’ve fecking fainted?’

‘Tell me what I owe and you can just give me the stuff.’ She told Ash.

‘You’ll make a right mess of that pretty face if I do. It’s like superglue. You need me to do it.’

‘And you’ll do a better job, will you?’

‘See any scars?’ He lowered his face closer through the gap. Silver eyes level with hers, his skin bronze smooth. He smelled of soap. Thump, thump, thump went her shameful heart.

Bad, bad spell.

‘You’d better come in.’

*

Having taken out her latent aggression first on the muck heap and then the rug room’s neat, towering columns of ancient jute – why did Lester never throw anything out? – Pax had lost track of time. While she’d marked those to be burned, she’d heard returning hooves, her mother’s clear bell of a voice – ‘Be nice to Pax, Luca, or I’ll make you teach pony lessons!’ – and later a car driving away. Trying not to let her pride corrode her calmness, she was reminded why solitude suited her, far from the steam of winter horse breath, sweet-scented muzzles and the shifting percussion of tens of legs through straw. Because horses brought comfort, and comfort made her feelings come alive, and she didn’t want to feel anything. Feelings hurt right now, from the sting of false friendship to the acid attack of a wronged husband.

‘Bloody, bloody, bloody man!’ She caught herself hissing in time to her rug-folding and stopped.

Feelings were dangerous today, catching her at her most pre-menstrual, volatile and vulnerable. Because as well as making Pax lose control so that she shouted and cried and forgot to be kind, feelings brought with them the familiar soul-soaked need for a drink, her reflex comfort, even this early. They drank caffè correcto at daybreak in Italy, beer with breakfast in Belgium, raised Pimm’s glasses to toast the first on course at Badminton, so why not here? Her grandfather had always argued that the sun was over the yardarm somewhere in the world, hip flask brimming before dawn autumn hunting. Pax’s first drink had been at a meet, cherry brandy or blackberry whisky or some such sweetness that had given her the pluck to tackle hedges the grown-ups quailed at. By the time she was competing in Young Riders’ teams, she was well-accustomed to downing a vodka miniature in the back of the horsebox before each phase: the first to relax one’s dressage, the second to get the eye in showjumping, and the third made one fearless across country. They’d all done it, even Lizzie who got legless on a flute of Buck’s Fizz. But Pax was the one who couldn’t stop, who had ridden her dreams off a cliff.