A sports car shot past at a dizzying speed. She clasped her hands together, closed her eyes and prayed. Please let me live through this…

‘Anna Barry?’ someone called.

Anna opened her eyes to find a guy who hardly looked old enough to have passed his driving test standing in front of her. ‘Yes?’ she said, wishing she had a bottle of water (or possibly something stronger) with her. Suddenly, her throat was very dry.

‘Your turn,’ he said, gesturing to the sleek gunmetal Aston Martin idling a few feet away. ‘Hop in.’

We have a deal, God, remember? Anna added silently as she slid into the supple leather of the driver’s seat. You make sure I get around this track in one piece and I’ll… I’ll… Well, no time to work that one out now. Let’s just say I’ll owe you one.

She closed the door, did up her seatbelt and then when Ade, the teenage driving instructor, was in the passenger seat, she pressed gingerly on the accelerator and pulled away.

Ade let her get away with twenty miles an hour for approximately ten seconds, then ordered her to put her foot down. There were other vehicles on the track, and it wasn’t safe for her to be crawling along like a pedal car, apparently.

Oh, how Spencer would have laughed if he could have seen her now.

Anna gritted her teeth, gripped the steering wheel. Ade sat in the passenger seat with a huge smirk on his face, like this was some big joke. Just like Spencer would have done. But for some reason Anna didn’t find it endearing, she just found it hugely irritating.

Without even trying, she discovered she was going faster.

‘Better!’ Ade said, looking unbearably smug. ‘Now, ease off the gas coming into this bend…’

Anna didn’t have much time to think about anything else for the next ten minutes. It took all her concentration to follow Ade’s instructions and navigate the hairpin bends the track was famous for. He would tell her when to hug the white line at the edge of the track, when to put her foot on the throttle, always urging her to go faster than she was comfortable with.

The worst thing was not braking going into the bends. Every time Anna’s heart was in her mouth and she was desperate to close her eyes, despite the fact she knew it was the stupidest thing she could have done… and accelerating out of the turns was even worse! It seemed her whole body and brain were a bundle of overstimulated nerves, and all her emotions, dampened down and numbed for so long, were suddenly turned up to the max. That might have been a good thing if the overriding emotion she felt hadn’t been sheer terror. She couldn’t have been happier when they pulled back into the pit after her three laps.

Thank God for that. Literally. She opened the door and reached for the strap of her helmet.