Once she’s settled in bed and he’s brought her a mug of herbal tea, he sits by her feet, one hand resting on her legs as he goes through emails and messages on his phone. Normality starts to return. Is this how it’s going to be from now on? Irrational, late-night thoughts about doppelgängers? Weirdness creeping up on her when she least expects it, reminding her that she’ll never be fully herself again?

‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘The painting – it’s just taking so long to come back.’

But she can’t help worrying that it’s something else. The feeling when she saw him in the kitchen and thought he was a different person – it was so strange, sickening. The world seemed to split in two. Rob looked the same, but something – her instincts? her old self? her imagination? – was telling her that it wasn’t him.

‘Patience,’ he says, leaning over to kiss her.

Rob loves her work and is determined that she’ll be a fulltime artist again. He knows that she never wants to return to her police job. She doesn’t want to let him down. Maybe she has been pushing it recently.

‘Art’s the best healer,’ he’d said that day they first met on the ward, lingering to chat at her bedside. ‘Art and technology.’

When she was strong enough to walk down to the exhibition he’d organised in the hospital foyer, she was amazed to discover three of her own portraits on the walls. And she can’t deny that her euphoria at seeing them on display worked more wonders than any medicine. Two years earlier, she’d been let go by her own gallery, forced to take up a proper job with the police and ditch her career as an artist. It had been a while since she’d had any work shown in public.

‘I don’t think it’s a migraine,’ she says.

‘You just need to sleep.’

She knows he’s right. But she’s not sure she can face more dreams about Rob being replaced by a stranger.

4

Kate

When Kate wakes from a light sleep, Rob is still at the end of the bed in his tennis gear, checking his phone, getting up to walk around in circles, settling again. A bit like Stretch. Sometimes she thinks he has enough energy and ideas to solve all the world’s problems.

‘Rob…’ she says, but before he can reply, his phone rings.

‘You OK?’ he mouths to her, one hand over his phone. She nods and he walks out of the bedroom onto the terrace.