Twenty minutes later, wearing heavier make-up than she’d normally do during the day, she pulled on her coat, grabbed her bag and headed out.

The rain had stopped, the day was blue-sky bright, but it didn’t lift her mood. She walked, eyes down, mind swirling with conflicting thoughts, one minute sure Amelia was having an affair with Jack and involved somehow with Lucien Pleasant, the next castigating herself for her crazy paranoia.

Molly reached South Kensington station in a daze, waited for the Circle line tube and ten minutes later was making her way through the crowds at Victoria station. Outside, the pavement was a heaving mass of people; fast-moving Londoners intent on their destination, dawdling, gawping tourists stopping abruptly to take photographs, selfie-sticks wielded like dangerous weapons forcing passers-by to duck and dive.

As a veteran London commuter, she weaved and dodged without much thought and with little attention to what was going on around her. Strange notions chased through her head and befuddled her brain. Nearer to the café, the crowds thinned. She stood at the roadside waiting for pedestrian lights to change, throwing a sympathetic glance at the woman beside her who was trying, unsuccessfully by the sound of the cries, to soothe a fractious child. When Molly looked back to the crossing lights, it was turquoise eyes she saw, and she closed her eyes briefly on the stupidity of it all. Maybe her sudden suspicion of Amelia was trying to deflect attention from her own idiotic behaviour. Tears welled as she watched the lights, waiting for them to turn.

A blow to the small of her back made Molly cry out as she was pushed forward into the moving traffic. She sought desperately to regain her balance, arms flailing, twisting her body so she was at an angle to the car that was bearing down on her. That one movement saved her from the full brunt of the collision but the contact was enough to send her flying.

Witnesses, she was told later, said she’d landed with such a thud they thought she was dead. She thought so too as she lay unable to move, shouts and screams swirling above her, darkness creeping around the edges of her vision until it was all gone. Later, she remembered there had been a millisecond of relief that she’d no longer have to worry about anything.

For the next twenty-four hours, she was vaguely aware of voices; some were reassuring, some demanding, others questioning. She ignored them all, choosing consciously or not to stay in the comforting darkness, the steady beep-beep of a monitor close to her right ear telling her all she needed to know. She was in a hospital and she was alive.