‘No.’

‘They were going to kill you.’

Victoria could always think quickly when she was in a tight spot, and so it didn’t take her very long to decide what she was going to do.

‘I think I’m beginning to remember something about the accident,’ she said.

Isabelle got dressed and dabbed some concealer under her eyes. It felt like the first day back at school after the summer holidays – a sense of unreality, as if one world was overlapping with another. Surely she could not work at a time like this? With Will hovering between life and death on the other side of the planet, with her family life turned upside down, her mother alternately hugging her and running to the phone for long, hushed conversations with unknown callers, frantically scribbling notes and lists, scratching around on the internet, producing hot meals and clean clothes out of thin air, like a magician . . . And on top of all this, there was Tokyo Fashion Week to deal with, four days of shows and parties in the Far East, alone and friendless.

She had to pull herself together for a meeting with Walker Parker. She’d ignored their messages for as long as she could, but when she finally heard the words ‘meltdown’ and ‘foreclose’ she decided that she owed it to Will to show her face.

She had not been to Hoxton since walking out of the studio in January, never looking back. Not so many weeks ago, really – and yet it seemed as if she was revisiting her remote past, like an old woman returning to the scene of a distant childhood. The buildings looked the same, more or less – something had been knocked down, surely, and that scaffolding never used to be there – and there were the same trees, the same patches of grass, the same grey London skies above it all. But the feeling was different, the people strange, as if the old inhabitants had been swept away, replaced. She looked around for reassurance, for the faces she had known in the past, the hellos and how are yous of those early days of sandwiches in the square. But there was nothing.

‘Hello!’ Dan appeared at the door as soon as she put her finger on the buzzer, almost as if he’d been looking out for her. ‘How are you? You look great.’

‘I feel terrible,’ said Isabelle, ‘but thank you anyway.’ He stood a yard away from her, hands hanging awkwardly by his side, wearing a nice crisply ironed blue and white striped shirt, a pair of grey wool trousers, polished black oxfords. His blond hair was neatly cut, his face clean shaven, and he exuded health. ‘It’s nice to see you, Dan.’ It was, too. He was like a breath of fresh air in a sickroom.

‘Thanks.’ He beamed.

‘Come on then,’ she said, taking a step towards him, ‘give us a kiss.’