And the farside of the lake utterly changed. No café, no boathouse, no sailing club. No buildings that made any sense. Just a collection of huts. As if everything had been washed away by the mist and replaced by another land entirely. The most obvious cause for what she had seen, Tilda had decided as she drained her wine, was that grief had finally unhinged her. She was losing her flimsy hold on her own sanity. It was not a conclusion that brought her any comfort. And the only way she could think of to disprove it, to come up with something, anything else, was to go to the north shore and reassure herself that everything was still there, still as it should be, in all its slightly tacky, hot dog and paddleboat normality. That her hallucination, if such it was, amounted to nothing more than the febrile workings of a troubled mind. Her grief counselor, all those months ago, had advised her to accept her flashbacks as a part of the grieving process. Was this latest vision simply more of the same?

So here she is, duffle-coated against the late autumn chill, woolly hat pulled low, her pale plait tucked into her collar and Thistle walking a little stiffly at her side on the end of an old leather belt that stands in for a lead. Although it is late in the year, it is the weekend, and plenty of people have taken the opportunity to come down to the lake. The little car park is nearly full, and the bicycle racks bristle with mountain bikes and racers, their riders sitting nearby to eat their lunches, or wandering closer to the shore to view the lake. There is a family of swans being fed by some walkers, their cygnets grown large but still sporting some of their grubby brown feathers. Pushy mallards waddle onto the small tarmac quay in the hope of sandwich crusts or maybe the stub of an ice-cream cone. A harassed woman shepherds her own brood of young children away from the water’s edge, luring them toward the café with the promise of hot dogs. A party of teenage canoeists busy themselves unloading their boats from a trailer.

All perfectly normal. Solid people. Real buildings. Of course.