After that he started talking, as if we knew each other now, as if we were not still total strangers, and that was really when I felt the first stirrings of fear.

I had not looked in the mirror of the hotel bathroom because the guilt had been there from the start, the shame of breaking all my promises to Christian, all those promises that could never be put back together again no matter what I did. But if the guilt was kicking in, the first pulsing pain of a tumour that will never be cut out of you, it was fear I felt most of all. James Caine lay on his side running a hand over my bare shoulder and he talked of meeting again – later that day in Tokyo, because there was so much I still had to see, blah blah, and then when we were back home, because this could not end here, he said.

I was already plotting ways to avoid him in the long day ahead. Don’t commit to a meeting. Don’t answer the phone. Forget about all the networking opportunities around the conference. Don’t show up at the conference’s farewell dinner tonight. Get out of the hotel and spend the day getting lost in this city of forty million. As he talked about meeting up for breakfast, I was plotting how to shake him off. I had had enough of him. Just get through the day and go home to your life, Tara, I thought. Because James Caine scared me a bit now, and what we had done terrified me, and I quickly pulled on my clothes and went back to my room as the day was breaking.

And I was glad to get away from him.

5

Christian

Tara cried out in her sleep.

Jet lag, I thought, rolling onto my side and placing a single kiss on her shoulder, slipping an arm around her waist and under her T-shirt, feeling the warm, long length of her, the total adorable Tara-ness of my beautiful wife.

‘It’s OK,’ I whispered in the darkness. ‘Sleep some more. It’s not time yet.’

She moaned something I didn’t catch and shifted, as if trying to get comfortable and failing, and I held her until she was still again and gently breathing, sliding back into that shallow restless sleep that comes after a twelve-hour flight across the planet and a body clock that is no longer still over there but not yet back over here.

Then I lay on my back and I stared at the ceiling.

Work, I thought.

It’s her work.

There was an unremitting stress that came with running her own business, the pressure that comes with never really clocking off, the constant demand on her mind and body and budget.

And there was something else bothering me, too.

There was a car that came hurtling down our little street five days a week, Monday to Friday, very early and recklessly fast. A man who I felt in my heart wanted to kill my family.