The space is huge! At least twenty yards long and almost ten yards wide, with a kitchen bar in one corner, dining table in another, all reclaimed-wood floors, industrial-brick walls and loading-bay doors. There’s a pool table, a cinema zone and a bedroom at the far end. She wonders for a moment if she’s come to Rob’s office by mistake and everyone’s out. It’s even bigger than she expected. How does one person live here?

She wanders around, taking in all the art. Vast canvasses and installations, including one that she recognises, a grotesque ‘data-mask’. It’s a 3D-printed sculpture of a face and was in the house in Cornwall for a while, but she found it too disturbing. Rob explained it to her once: the artist, Sterling Crispin, reverse-engineered facial-recognition algorithms to show how human faces are seen by machines. And then her heart misses a beat as she come across three of her own works. They are the same paintings that Rob exhibited in the hospital show, the sight of which had so lifted her spirits.

She stands in front of them and stares. Of course she immediately starts to see things that are wrong with them, but they aren’t so bad. Her goal was to paint unflinching, raw portraits, to create a sense of confrontation between artist and sitter, the latter usually wide eyed, as if they’d been caught doing something untoward. She leans in closer to a portrait of an old man who used to sell gas bottles and sacks of coal on the canal; his lined, world-weary face. She remembers layering on the oil paint with a scalpel, impasto style, mixing the lumpy colours to create coarse, textured flesh, chatting quietly with him.

The sight of these pictures makes her want to cry with happiness – and to paint again. She had a very similar reaction in the hospital. She walks on down the wall and sees another portrait, by the late Sarah Raphael, one of her heroes. It’s jewel-like and intense, an early work and full of empathy. She feels honoured to share a wall with her, but it’s a salutary reminder of her own limits as an artist.

Upstairs she finds a second bedroom, a wet room, and a spacious roof terrace complete with real grass and a scattering of wicker chairs around an outdoor bar. The views of London, bathed in early evening sunlight, are breathtaking. Can she see Rob’s office from here? They’re close to Old Street roundabout, where he works. She’s suddenly desperate to see him, to pick up where they left off before things started to go wrong in Cornwall. She’s just been imagining things, as Jake says, suffering from Capgras syndrome. Dr Varma will be here shortly. He’ll confirm the diagnosis, she feels certain of that now. The more she thinks about Capgras, the more it sounds like her.