She used to paint a lot of dogs before she became a super recogniser. Not by choice. When the portrait commissions dried up, she had no option. Labradors mainly. The occasional retriever. A few racehorses too. The price she paid for living in Wiltshire. Now, it seems, she can’t even do dogs.

‘Hockney painted forty-five pictures of his dachshunds,’ a soft Irish voice says behind her.

She spins around to see Rob leaning against the bedroom doorway to her left, a tennis racquet in one hand.

‘Took him a long while to get it right. Easels all over the house, apparently,’ he adds.

Rob practises with a machine when he’s down here, out on the court at the rear of the house. Two hundred balls on his backhand before breakfast. He peels off an electronic bandana, no doubt another piece of wearable technology he’s testing. Kate takes in his sweaty smile, his windblown, tousled hair. Something’s wrong. He folds his arms approvingly, glancing out to sea and then back at her, before looking at his trainers. He usually does that when he’s trying to get her into bed. One moment pleading, the next all bashful. But then he fixes her in the eye.

‘I know it’s taken time,’ he says, ‘but you’re looking so much better, Kate. And that necklace – it really suits you.’

The necklace. She raises a hand to touch it, remembering the pinch of pain, and time seems to slow down. She stares at him, his familiar face, his blinking puppy eyes, but she no longer recognises him. Her brain tingles, like déjà vu, but this is different, the opposite feeling. It’s as if she’s never seen this man before.

‘Kate?’ he says. His voice is far away, distorted. ‘You OK?’

She can feel the mug slipping through her fingers, but she can’t do anything about it. It falls and shatters on the concrete floor, splashing tea over her bare toes. Stretch trots off to another room.

‘Are you hurt?’ he asks, rushing forward, his hands on her shoulders as he kicks away a jagged shard of mug from her feet.

She shakes her head slowly, still staring at him, reality fracturing around her. Rob holds her close but it only makes things worse. Who is this person? She feels disorientated, nauseous, disconnected – from Rob, the house, her life, as if she’s suddenly watching herself from a distance.

‘You’ve been overdoing it, that’s all,’ Rob says, glancing at the canvas. ‘When did you get up?’

‘Just after you went out,’ she manages to say. What’s wrong with her?

‘You mustn’t push it,’ he says, leading her through to the bedroom, where he closes the curtains and switches off the light. She’s suffering from a migraine, he thinks, and needs to rest in darkness. She had a lot of headaches in the immediate aftermath of the accident, but none recently.