Christopher had not realised that his mother, who’d always had her reservations about Nicola, had tried so hard to get her to visit him, but thought it was typical of his parent that she had not attempted to make capital out of Nicola’s desertion of her son. He could have told her that trying to change Nicola’s mind on this score would be a lost cause, but it hadn’t stopped him feeling bitterly hurt himself. Over the eighteen months of his incarceration they had spoken occasionally on the telephone – painfully stilted, unsatisfactory calls, always at his instigation and always under threat of his precious prison phone card running out in the middle of the conversation, since incoming calls to prisoners were not permitted. He thought, ruefully, that it would have been better for everyone if he’d accepted that their relationship was over before his conviction, but during the first traumatic months of his sentence he had hung on to the possibility of keeping it on hold, albeit in deep freeze, until he could deal with the situation in person. That Nicola might have been faithful to him during his absence seemed highly improbable and it was therefore no surprise when they eventually met to hear that she had been having an affair, about which she made no secret, honesty being one of Nicola’s best qualities, though not one she ever felt the need to economise over. What had surprised him was that she seemed to think that they could just pick up again where they had left off – or rather where they had been before his own disastrous loss of temper which had led to the accident, and which he now so bitterly regretted.

‘We can have a bit of fun together again – which I’m sure you need – and see how things work out,’ said Nicola breezily, brushing aside her affair as an irrelevance, easily disposed of. The fact that none of the issues between them which had caused the row before the crash had been resolved didn’t seem to bother her in the least.

‘You can’t seriously think we can take up as if nothing has happened?’ he asked in astonishment. ‘We couldn’t agree on anything about the future before. We’re two years older now, and I for one have undergone a huge change.’