‘Diversion helps shift my thought pattern on and off large amounts of data. Frantic information grabs work like those weird dot sequences where you can’t see them when you’re looking straight at them.’

‘So tell me about the time you spent unable to communicate. No reason we have to dwell on my private life, is there?’

Connie sighed. ‘I’m not sure that’s very gentlemanly of you. Isn’t there some sort of British code that says you’re supposed to do whatever a lady asks of you?’

‘Given how well that’s worked out for me over the past year, I’ve decided to try a different tack, which was your advice to me.’

‘Yeah, shot myself in the foot there. What do you want to know?’ Connie threw herself on her bed and arranged the pillows beneath her head.

‘Comfortable?’

‘Just getting on the couch ready to talk to my shrink. Want to play?’

‘Is it a game?’ Baarda asked, turning round in his chair to watch her.

‘Actually no, now that you ask. It’s not a game at all.’

‘How did it happen?’

‘Playing lacrosse,’ she said. ‘So often the moments that define your life are the ones you’re ignorant about at the time. Until you learn to deal, you spend countless hours rewriting history in your head. If I’d turned left at the roundabout instead of right, if I’d remembered to turn the gas off. In my case, it was if I hadn’t run quite so hard to take a shot at goal.’

Freshman year, already accepted into a great college, aiming to study astronomy. The future had been nothing but a gleaming sunlit day. The lacrosse game had ended prematurely for her. She’d been tackled fairly, but her head had clashed with another girl’s, and they’d both ended up on their backs on the pitch. Her opponent had got up first with an egg growing from her forehead. Connie had sat up, staggered slightly, felt the world lurch beneath her and swallowed down the vomit that threatened to rise and embarrass her in front of the whole team plus spectators.