Mia shrugged, her head hanging again, her silences saying as much as her words. ‘The day after they found Cory, I told him to give me his best offer. It’s nothing like what we could have got if we could afford to wait, but he knows we can’t. So he wins too and we keep on losing. We just keep on losing.’ She stared out to sea, at the black morass which had taken everything from them. Clover could see the tears shining on her cheeks. ‘Cory always said this place was where our souls danced, but now it’ll just be torn down and some glass holiday home will get built for a tech millionaire who probably doesn’t even like getting his feet wet.’

Clover put an arm around her friend’s shoulders. ‘I’m so, so sorry, Mia,’ she whispered. ‘This is all so unfair. You don’t deserve any of it.’

They sat huddled together, Mia weeping as the moon sketched a tremulous path across the bay.

‘I just wish I knew why,’ she whispered into the dark. ‘How can I ever find any peace when I don’t understand why this happened to us? How do I explain to my boys why they lost their dad, and their home . . .?’

Clover was quiet. In the process of making Pipe Dreams, she had watched the footage of the accident thousands of times. In her mind’s eye she could easily see Cory paddling for the wave, the turn of Kit Foley’s head to check his rival, and then him paddling too . . . Both men standing on their boards within a second of each other. Cory had priority as the outside rider, but Foley deliberately blocked his line, forcing him off the board just as the wave broke. It was an automatic interference penalty for Foley, but by then Cory was under the water.

Cory had needed only one more good run to win the heat, win the event, take the world title. Foley had been running down the clock and he’d burned him to stop him getting the points. The will to win was one thing, gamesmanship another. But to do what Foley had done, in those heavy surf conditions . . . it had been nothing short of reckless endangerment.

They stared out at the midnight horizon together, but as the moon peeped from behind a cloud, Clover felt something, previously hidden, begin to surface within her too. Through the shock and the sadness, the first stirrings of anger shifted inside her – because Mia was right. Her husband was dead. Her family’s life in ruins. The very least she deserved was to know why.

Chapter Four

Six months later

The train picked up speed, the scenery melding into a smudge of hesitant greys and greens. Clover looked out over red rooftops, seeing nothing.

‘There’s hardly any snow!’ Johnny complained, looking out at fields that were muddy, not frozen.