‘Alice,’ he pleads, ‘the last few months have been torture. You and the children gone, I felt so .. . I don’t know . . . rootless, flying backwards and forwards from London to Switzerland, those interminable legal meetings, nothing but that grungy rented flat waiting for me, every business collapsing around my ears, so when Hogan called me and offered me this deal, it seemed like light at the end of the tunnel. I always knew there was opportunity round here.’ He balls his hand into a fist. ‘I could smell it, right from the start and, God knows, Alice, I thought it was a chance to escape, leave all our problems behind and start over again but then Hogan told me what was going on and well–’ He laughs bitterly. ‘I know you, Alice, you have all these funny ideas, you’re a dreamer and I thought you might do something stupid, irresponsible, ruin it for both of us.’ He looks up at me in total misery, all bravado stripped away and in an instant I see my son in his face and I remember Jack that night, his arms wrapped tightly around me as he’d listened to the coyotes howling out their secret trysts to one another.

‘I told Winfred I was afraid of nothing,’ Jack had said, ‘but the truth is, I’m afraid of everything.’

‘Oh, Robert.’ I hold him to me and when I feel his shoulders slump, I hold him closer still. ‘I’m so sorry.

I’m so sorry.’ But even as I’m mumbling it over and over again, I realize he cannot understand what I’m apologizing for.

Robert stirs. ‘We have to leave. We have to get out of here.’

‘What do you mean?’ I release him.

He pushes up off the sofa. ‘It’s not safe, we should pack the children’s things and just go.’

‘Go? What are you talking about? .. . Go where?’

‘Home!’ he says, and still I stare at him, unable to grasp what he means. I am home.

‘We’ll drive to Tucson,’ he says wildly, ‘to the airport. Get on the next flight.’

‘But our tickets are from Phoenix,’ I say stupidly.

‘To hell with that! We’ll buy new tickets.’

‘Robert, no!’

But Robert has thrown off his shock and awe. He paces around the room, talking, making plans. We will camp in his rented flat, he will speak with the agent, see if we can get our house back early. We’ll pick up the threads of our old lives. Our London lives . . .

‘Alice, we never have to come back here,’ he says emphatically. ‘Don’t you see, it’s perfect! We’ll sell this place to Hogan if he wants it so badly and in a few months we’ll look back on this terrible night and it will just be a bad dream.’