As she navigated one such detour, she stepped onto a large boulder. She didn’t notice that most of the soil beneath it had been washed away. The rock came loose under her weight and Faye was catapulted forward into a bush.

With thorns embedded in her hands, arms, neck and chest, she remained propped half upright in the plant for a moment, unsure of how to move without being further impaled. She was bleeding from several perforations and her heart was pounding from the fall. As she slowly unpicked her flesh from the barbs, more blood flowed.

Her walking stick had also become entangled in the thorn bush and, after extracting it, Faye shuffled down the path until she came across a puddle. She sat, picked the remaining thorns from her flesh and, dipping her buff in the puddle, daubed her wounds. Several continued bleeding. Faye stood and walked on, unable to ignore Derek’s voice in her head.

“Were you ever tested for dyspraxia as a child? I’ve never known anyone as clumsy.”

“What do you mean?” she’d asked.

“Surely you’ve noticed the scratch on your car door?”

“No.”

Derek waggled his eyebrows. “It’s there. You can’t deny that.”

“I haven’t noticed it,” she said, making her way into the yard where her car was parked.

He followed. “It looks like you caught it on a pillar.”

With the blue paint scraped away over about the length of a pen to reveal silver metal and an indent deep enough to create a shadow, the scratch wasn’t easy to miss. Faye crouched and ran the tip of her finger along it.

“I’m flummoxed. I, well, surely I would have heard it happen?”

Derek pursed his lips and nodded.

“It doesn’t make sense. I can’t think where I would have connected with anything lately. I’ve only—”

“That’s the point though, isn’t it? You don’t notice things. You’re clumsy.”

Faye felt her eyes well up. She bowed her head and examined the damage again. She felt silly getting tearful about the car, but she’d been so careful with it since he’d bought it for her four years earlier. It even worried her when Derek used it for golf every week. Particularly since he always had a few drinks in the club house afterwards. She blinked the tears away and stood up.

“Perhaps when—”

“Don’t apologise. It’s okay. I’ll call the insurance on Monday and get it seen to. Hopefully they won’t raise our premium too high.”

She was clumsy again when she broke the coffee machine.

“I did explain how one inserts coffee pods into the machine, didn’t I?” asked Derek, as he burst into the bathroom one morning.

“Yes. It’s simple.”

“Exactly. Then how did you manage to stuff it up again?”

“I don’t think I—”

“You forced the capsule tray closed. It’s cracked.”