At the end of the first training session after the competition, Aleks asked me to come to his office. My heart was skidding when I went in, though I wasn’t sure where I should focus my apprehension – would he want to discuss my diving or my sister?

‘Joan,’ he said. ‘Have a seat.’

His office was usually tidy but now it was a mess: papers all over the desk, folders, his whistle on its fraying black nylon rope. In one corner of the room there was a bouquet of red and yellow pool noodles tied with a string. I realised that it must have been Julie who kept the place clean for him. I glanced at his hand: no ring.

I considered the possibility that he would do what Grace said he’d done with Camilla: lock the door, twist the venetian blinds closed. But no. He shut the door, then returned to his seat. I had a whiff of his marine-smelling aftershave as he passed me.

‘Last weekend,’ he said. I watched his Adam’s apple bounce in his throat. It gave me the urge to swallow. ‘What happened?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. What I understood about my terrible performance was more an impression than an explanation. Unnerved by him and by Lou, by their proximity to one another, I’d felt half in and half out of my own body, and had the sense that I would have been able to dive competently if I’d occupied one or the other space fully. Instead it felt like I was fighting to put myself on or take myself off. Of course, there was no way of communicating this to Aleks, so I said again, ‘I don’t know.’

Then I started crying. There was no build-up, no trembling lower lip. The tears came out immediately, like a sneeze. I was horrified.

He plucked a tissue from a box and held it out to me; when I didn’t take it, staunching my nose with my fingers, he let the tissue go and it floated elegantly into my lap.

‘Enough,’ he said.

I dared a look at him but I couldn’t read his expression. Behind Aleks’s head there was a portrait of him as a younger man, executing a dive in competition – there was no platform in the photo and no water, just the tan twist of his body against a pale blue sky.

‘Now you know how it feels. Real competition. Now you know what it’s like when someone rattles your cage. They’re all doing it, you know. The other teams. Even your own team.’

I thought of Grace and her medal, her Gatorade, how she’d jerked her ankle, flapping the hotel slipper against the sole of her foot over and over again.

‘I don’t mind you failing,’ Aleks continued. ‘This time. I think it will be like a splinter in your finger. I think a little humiliation will do you the world of good.’