They didn’t talk much as she drove. Rob just stroked the dogs and watched Elle. It was a relief, after all this time of not seeing her, to be able to watch her freely.

Her long pale hands gripped the steering wheel, the veins like blue lines on a map underneath her skin. Her hair fell in front of her face and she brushed it away. He wished he could reach out and touch it, to confirm that was what he had felt against his face when he was unconscious.

Eventually, when Rob confessed he was feeling weak with hunger, they drove back towards town and stopped at the chipper for sustenance. Then they drove to a lookout over the beach, one of their old haunts.

‘This is heaven,’ said Rob, launching into his battered cod. ‘The first real food I’ve had in weeks. Good old Johnny Chips.’

When they were finished eating they went down onto the strand for a walk. The water was rougher at this part of the beach than up at the hotel and the shore stonier, and they could feel drops against their cheeks when the waves slammed onto the rocks. The dogs ran ahead and then hurried back just as quickly, as if they were afraid to let Rob out of their sight again.

‘I’m sorry I didn’t come and visit you, Rob,’ she said eventually.

‘But you did.’

She blushed. ‘But that was . . . it was different. I should have come and apologised to you when you were awake. It didn’t do any use while you were sleeping.’

‘Apologise?’

‘For the roof,’ she said. ‘For working you so hard. It was my fault that you crashed your car.’

He laughed. ‘That’s why you want to apologise?’

She nodded. ‘I feel so awful. It was my insistence that the roof be finished on time and anyone could see that you were working yourself to death.’

‘Forget about it,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t your fault.’

He felt cheated. All along he had nursed some small hope that Elle had come to him because she realised she loved him, but it was nothing of the sort. She just felt guilty about something that wasn’t her fault at all.

They walked along in silence and he felt that once again they were haunted by misunderstandings. He tried again: ‘Why are you running away, Elle?’

‘I just can’t do it,’ she said after a pause. ‘I could save the hotel for us and I could renovate it, but I can’t do what Mum did. I’ve got no way with people and that’s what visitors come for – from near or far. It won’t matter if we serve the best food, have the most beautiful rooms, the prettiest garden. I can’t be as constant and wonderful as she was.’

‘Has anyone actually said to you that you need to be the new Anna?’