I could not shake this feeling. My first ever earthquake made me see how fragile we all are, how there are forces at work that we never even think about, and how you can never really know what is going to happen next.

My heart was pounding so hard that I could hear the blood in my veins.

In the lift, I hit the button for the fifty-second floor. The bar.

‘I need a drink,’ I said.

There was no small talk this time. I sipped another glass of Shiraz in silence as James Caine rehydrated with sparkling water and the red emergency lights of the Tokyo night looked like they were putting on a show just for us. All that twinkling hard red glitter. The bartender came across and James Caine engaged him in some natural disaster conversation.

The bartender was sanguine. It wasn’t the big one, the one that the forty million residents of Tokyo were all waiting for, the one that could come tomorrow morning or one hundred years from now, the one that would be the end of everything.

I drained my glass and I stood. This time I let James pay the bill as I walked uncertainly from the bar. Something had been disturbed in me. It was everything coming together, I told myself. The jet lag and the mad bar and the relief that the speech was done and had gone well and all the beer and red wine I had drunk tonight and the guitar of Jimmy Page and memory of that invisible train so close to my face. We rode the lift in silence to the club level, still full of delegates at the conference. It was real night now, though not yet late. Our rooms were on the same floor, I realised as we exited the lift and began down the long corridor. He made no attempt to touch me but I sensed that he was ready should I stumble or fall. I did not. His room was nearest the lift.

‘This is me,’ he said, taking out the card key for his room. ‘Good night then, Tara.’

I nodded and moved on down the corridor, remembering the way it had felt when I was waiting for the world to start coming apart.

I paused outside my door, grateful that the earth was no longer moving.

He was still waiting at the other end of the corridor, as if making sure I was safe, standing there like a younger Harrison Ford just back from a run. Does Harrison Ford run?

James Caine was concerned about me. And there was something else. Of course there was something else. It was as if he was giving me time to make up my mind.

Because, you see, I still hadn’t quite made up my mind.

I stood there, knowing that I should be well on the way to drunk by now, but I suddenly felt stone-cold sober and nowhere near ready to rest my eyes.