Her sense of relief came from knowing she wasn’t, after all, insane. She was now one hundred per cent certain it had been him on the hill that day. That he had also stolen her hat and gloves from the bookshop, slipped the ravioli into her basket. He had to have been watching the house, to know that she was alone. He must have been constantly watching her …

The fury came from the way he’d gaslighted her, lying so convincingly at every turn. Because now the deceptions all came back to her: claiming to have overheard Connie’s name in the queue for the Doge’s Palace, his friend with the crumbling palazzo, the supposed meeting in Milan. Then there was Kraków and the night she’d thought she saw him pass by the table where she was having supper with the two Norfolk teachers. He’d said then, too, that it couldn’t have been him: he’d flown in just an hour ago. Not to mention the man who’d lost his car keys at the food fair, stopping to chat to Jill as she changed out of her boots … Fiona Raven’s book launch …

As she’d stood stock still in the hall the previous night, staring at the green hat and gloves still lying on the tissue paper, the last of the scales now incontrovertibly torn from her eyes, Connie kept asking herself why she hadn’t seen through him, questioned his behaviour, right from the beginning. Lynne and Neil had spelled it out. Just the way he’d turned up on her tours like that, always knew the number of her hotel room, was bizarre, by anyone’s standards.

I wasn’t looking, she thought. I was enjoying it too much, carried away by the game … until he’d arrived on her patch, where he’d fooled everyone else, too, of course. It confused her. The delusions he had about loving her were obviously acute – and crazy – but presented in such a reasonable way that she’d continued to think he might see sense, if she could only find the right words. But it was as if she were speaking Chinese to an Inuit. He simply didn’t understand. Added to which, she couldn’t imagine why anyone would have such an obsessive crush on her. Especially not at her age.

She’d eventually hauled herself out of Tessa’s deep Victorian bath last night, dried herself and climbed into her pyjamas. The one person she ached to talk to was Devan. Without him, the hole in her life was bottomless. She’d always turned to him when there was a problem, enjoying his unquestioned support, the effortless back and forth of a marriage, without fully appreciating – till she lost it – how vital, how intrinsic it was to her life. In any other circumstances, she could imagine how they might now sit and dissect Jared’s behaviour. Make sense of it … together.