After they had said goodbye, Lucy switched her phone to silent. She wondered how helpful she had really been to Olivia. These playful riffs had always been a feature of their friendship, especially when there was something going on that was too charged to be worked out logically or conclusively. She saw now that the news of Olivia’s pregnancy had released an undertow of grief about the fact that she could no longer, in her own eyes, responsibly have a child. She had defended herself against that grief with a muddled fantasy about having a child with Nathan, as if the missed opportunity to be a single parent with a menacing diagnosis, bringing up a young child with a man who now hated her, were something to regret.

Apart from anything else, if she had a small child she might well not be lying in Hunter’s private hammock; although six months ago it was the last place she would have imagined herself being under any circumstances. When she had first met him, he had been far too charming to be lovable and when she started working for him, she often found him positively obnoxious. It was only over their dinner in November, on his second visit to London, when he had chosen to be open rather than impressive, that he became impressive for the first time. She could see that his manic lifestyle was scheduled by chronic loneliness and by the suspicion that any surrender to true feeling would act as Kryptonite to his superpowers. He was obviously attracted to her, but his relative authenticity was still too new for her to be able to trust him with her diagnosis. After that dinner she had thought about him more often, with a vague erotic curiosity, but she still chose to register her biopsy as ‘sick leave’. It was only when he turned up unexpectedly at Howorth that things changed more convincingly. His charm was replaced by kindness. His professional audacity turned out to be an extension of his emotional courage, rather than a substitute for it, as she had first suspected. He enveloped her in a protection that not only made her feel safe, but left her free to feel unsafe: when she was overcome by terror and despair (which she sometimes still was) he would meet her in whatever black site she had been abducted to by her fears.