Whatever reason she was back in Mulberry Bay, it had nothing to do with him, he was sure. Rob would just keep working, keep living his life, and stay as far away from Elle as he could.

Later, in her room, Elle reflected on how lame and powerless her words to Penny had sounded: ‘I’ve got an idea.’

All of them had had ideas aplenty over the last few weeks and nothing had come of them. What made this one any different? Did she really think she could pull this off?

Penny, for her part, had seemed almost too numb to react. Her questions had been comically distracted. ‘Did you forget something?’ she had asked. ‘Has something terrible happened?’

Something terrible will happen if we don’t do something, Elle had thought, but didn’t say anything.

When she looked into the mirror in her room, she could see why Penny might have wondered. She did indeed look as though she had been through some harrowing ordeal. Her face seemed thinner, more heavily lined, her freckles stark against the pallor of her skin. The bruising on her nose from her encounter with Rob’s chest was starting to fade, but the yellowish tinge around her eyes made her look even more ghastly.

Elle had never been one to worry unduly about her looks. She accepted them for what they were and went about her business. Of course, she had the odd twinges of worry about her ageing face and whether her tawny hair would soon fade to bronze, then grey, but now, looking at herself, she wondered if things were truly taking a turn for the worse. Perhaps she would get old all at once, overnight almost, and previous acquaintances would hardly recognise her on the street. She didn’t have any of Anna and Penny’s firm plumpness that somehow ironed out, or altogether resisted the invasions of age.

She turned away with a sigh. It wasn’t worth worrying about now. She had more pressing matters on her mind, such as how to achieve the thing that she had come back to do. It was one thing to see it in dream form almost, completely another to drag it into reality. She didn’t want to see her vision compromised, changed, cheapened. She was like this with the execution of her buildings too. It had to be right, otherwise it wasn’t worth it. If it couldn’t be the way she envisioned, then it would be a failure.

Could she count on Penny for help? She hoped that the vagueness her sister had shown when she encountered her in reception was just shock. It would need to be all hands on deck if she was going to pull this off.