Because he hadn’t just said any old words, had he? He’d said, ‘I beg your pardon?’ Their words, their thing.

Had she just wanted to hear it come back to her so badly that she’d imagined it? It had to be that. She’d been running off emotion last night, even before she’d got home and ended up curled on the floor of her dead husband’s wardrobe. Look at how she’d spoken to Gabi…

Oh, God. Gabi!

She’d forgotten to call her last night to apologize. She was a horrible, horrible friend!

Anna was usually a very careful driver, so much so that Spencer had taken to calling her ‘Grandma’ when she’d got behind the wheel, but she swerved onto the hard shoulder and brought the car to a stop. This was an emergency. Her handbag was on the passenger seat, and she delved into it with her left hand and started rummaging around. It was only when her fingers reached the lining at the bottom that she realized her mistake.

Her phone was still sitting in the bottom of the wardrobe, where she’d thrown it after the call. As bad as she felt about Gabi, there was nothing she could do about it now. It would have to wait until she got home later that afternoon.

Anna squinted at the road ahead, indicated and pulled back into the traffic. The voice – his voice – replayed itself inside her head as she did so.

I beg your pardon?

Just what Spencer would have said, but it hadn’t been filled with barely contained laughter or the husky softness she would have expected. He’d sounded so serious, so sad. As if he’d been aching every bit as badly as she had at their separation.

That made sense, in a weird way. But also, it didn’t. Why, if she’d invented it, hadn’t she imagined Spencer’s usual cheeky tone? That was what she’d been yearning to hear, after all, his very Spencerness, captured in an inflexion, a nuance, to hear the smile in his words. Why had she made him sound so mournful?

Spencer would have laughed at her for letting her imagination run away with her, but was it really so ridiculous? They’d always said their love was special. Once, when they’d been at a dinner party and one of his friends had said he’d want his wife to move on and marry again if something happened to him, Spencer had quipped that he wasn’t that generous, that he’d find a way to come back because Anna was his and always would be his. What if he’d found a way to do that? No one really knew what happened after you’d died, did they? It was the one area where science could never prod its curious fingers. What if something beautiful, something impossible, had occurred?

No, she told herself. Just no.

It couldn’t be true. Because what was she going to do if it was? March into her in-laws’ house for lunch and calmly announce that she’d had a chat with their dearly departed son the night before? It sounded ridiculous. It was ridiculous.