‘Are you sure that’s not the janitor in disguise? Because I can’t see anything,’ John had whispered in her ear when the doctor turned his attention to the screen.

And then suddenly, they’d seen it. The grey clouds had parted to reveal a tiny human. She still has the first picture of Mathis in a box in the attic.

She lets her hand fall. Some other time, she thinks. I’ll look at it when I’m back home, maybe I’ll see it then.

The traffic alert jingle interrupts both her thoughts and the radio broadcast. The information is the same as last time, with the addition that the accident is serious and the police estimates that it will be at least another thirty minutes before traffic is moving again.

Only then does she sink.

Her hands are clammy as she clutches the wheel and forces herself to take slow breaths to calm her racing heart. She desperately fights to protect herself, to fend off the images flashing before her eyes. The memories she has never had but still carries inside her. The flashing blue lights. The sound of John and Mathis’s bodies being cut out of the wreckage of the car. All the things that had happened in the black void that swallowed everything from the moment John put his hand on her knee in a plea for reconciliation after the argument they’d had an hour earlier, until she woke up in the hospital.

She must have passed tens of accidents since then. She has learnt not to panic, not to give her thoughts and feelings free rein. Learnt not to look when she passes. Not to think. Over the past ten years, she has learnt to handle herself and her life. And traffic accidents.

But today, she fails.

Afterwards, she will tell herself it was a combination of factors. The doctor’s visit, all the talk about risks, her own uncertainty flaring up: Am I right to want to . . . ? Do I even have the right to . . . ? The memory of last time, when she had John by her side. The sound of sirens, the traffic jam, and the abrupt realisation that five hundred yards up the road, something has happened that will likely change one or several people’s lives forever. Or end them.

Not until the line starts moving again almost forty minutes later can Karen Eiken Hornby start breathing normally again. By then, she’s so exhausted and her eyes are so swollen she wouldn’t have recognised the remnants of the car that drove straight into the mountainside even if she had been looking that way.

Chapter 38

38

‘Bloody hell, what a fucking day.’