He kissed her then, and said softly, ‘I don’t think we should think about it any more.’ He kissed her shoulder. ‘I think we shouldn’t think full stop.’ He kissed her neck. ‘It’s our last night on the road and there’s nothing much we can do about anything. For tonight at least.’

He reached for her belt, undid it, then her jeans, his fingers measured and precise. She watched them and her heart began to pulse in her ears.

‘It’s time, Jessica Rae Thomas, that someone looked after you.’

Edward Nicholls washed her hair, his legs around her waist, as she lay back against him in the oversized bath. He rinsed it gently, smoothing it and wiping her eyes with a facecloth to stop shampoo getting into them. She went to do it herself, but he shushed her. Nobody had ever washed her hair, outside a hairdresser’s. It made her feel vulnerable and oddly emotional. When he was done, he lay in the steaming, scented water with his arms wrapped around her and kissed the tips of her ears. And then, as if some part of them agreed jointly that this had been quite enough romantic stuff, thank you, she felt him rise under her and swivelled, lowered herself onto him, and they fucked until the water sluiced out of the bath, and she couldn’t work out whether the pain of her foot was greater than her need to feel him inside her.

Some time later, they lay half submerged, legs entwined. And they started to laugh. Because it was a cliché to fuck in a shower but it was sort of ridiculous to do it in a bath, and it was even more ridiculous to be in this much trouble and yet this happy. Jess twisted so that she lay along the length of him, and draped her arms around his neck and pressed her wet chest to his, and she felt with utter certainty that she would never be as close to another human being again. God, I love you, she told him silently. And then so that she didn’t let those words burst, unbidden, from her mouth, she smothered him with kisses. She held his face in her hands and she kissed his jaw and his poor bruised temple, and his lips, and she felt his arms holding her to him and told herself that whatever happened she would always remember how this felt.

He brought his hand down over his face, wiping the moisture from it. He looked suddenly serious. ‘Do you think this is a bubble?’

‘Um, there’s lots of bubbles. It’s a –’

‘No. This. A bubble. We’re on this weird journey, where the normal rules don’t apply. Real life doesn’t apply. This whole trip has been … like time out of real life.’

She noticed that the water was pooling on the bathroom floor.

‘Don’t look at that. Talk to me.’

She dropped her lips to his collarbone, thinking. ‘Well,’ she said, lifting her head again, ‘in a little over five days, we’ve dealt with illness, distraught children, sick relatives, unexpected acts of violence, nearly broken feet, police and car accidents. I’d say that was quite enough real life for anyone.’

‘I like your thinking.’

‘I like your everything.’

‘We seem to spend a lot of time talking rubbish to each other.’

‘Well, I like that too.’

The water had started to cool. She wriggled out of his arms, and stood, reaching for the heated towel rail. She handed him a warm towel, wrapping one around herself. Oh, the utter sensual pleasure of fluffy hotel towels. He stood, rubbing at his hair vigorously with one hand.

She wondered, briefly, whether Ed was so used to fluffy hotel towels that he didn’t even notice. She watched him and felt suddenly bone-weary. She brushed her teeth, switched off the bathroom light, and when she turned back he was already in the enormous hotel bed, holding back the covers to allow her in. He flicked off the bedside lamp and she lay there beside him in the dark, feeling his damp skin against her own, wondering what it would be like to have this every night. To have a man all to herself for ever.

‘I don’t know what’s going to happen to me, Jess,’ he said, into the dark, as if he could hear her thoughts. His voice was a warning.

‘You’ll be okay.’

‘Seriously. You can’t do your optimism tricks on this one. Whatever happens, I’m probably going to lose everything.’

‘So? That’s my default position.’

‘But I might have to go away.’

‘You won’t.’

‘I might, Jess.’ His voice was uncomfortably firm.

And she spoke before she knew what she was saying. ‘Then I’ll wait,’ she said.

She felt his head tilt towards her, a question. ‘I’ll wait for you. If you want me to.’

He took three calls on the final leg home, all on hands-free. His lawyer, a man with an accent so grand he should have been announcing the arrival of the Royal Family at dinner, told him he was due at the police station the following Thursday. No, nothing had changed. Yes, said Ed, he understood what was happening. And, yes, he had spoken to his family. The way he said it made her stomach tense. She couldn’t help herself afterwards. She reached over and took his hand. When he squeezed it back he didn’t look at her.

His sister rang to say his dad had had a better night. They had a long conversation about some insurance bonds that his father had been concerned about, some keys that were missing from a filing cabinet, and what Gemma had had for lunch. Nobody talked about dying. She said to say hello and Jess shouted hello back and felt a bit self-conscious and a bit pleased at the same time.

After lunch he took a call from a man called Lewis, and they discussed market values and percentages and the state of the mortgage market. It took Jess a while to realize he was talking about Beachfront.

‘Time to sell,’ he said, when he rang off. ‘Still. Like you said, at least I have assets to dispose of.’

‘What’s it all going to cost you? The prosecution?’

‘Oh. Nobody’s saying. But reading between the lines, I think the answer is “most of it”.’

She couldn’t work out if he was more upset than he was letting on.

He tried to call someone else, but the answer phone kicked in. ‘It’s Ronan here. Leave a message.’ He hung up without saying anything.

With every mile, real life moved steadily towards them like an encroaching tide, cold, unstoppable. Jess thought about the fact that there was a whole swathe of his life she knew nothing about, and tried not to think about bubbles.

They finally arrived back shortly after four. As the Audi pulled into the street the rain had eased to a fine drizzle, the road looked oily with damp, the sprawling Danehall estate struggling to show spring promise. There was the little house, somehow smaller and scruffier than Jess remembered it and, oddly, like something that had nothing to do with her. Ed pulled up outside, and she peered out of the window at the peeling paintwork on the upstairs windows that Marty had never got round to painting because he said, really, you had to do a proper job, sanding it first and taking off the old paint and using filler to plug the gaps, and he had always been either too busy or too tired to do any of it. Just for a moment, she felt a wave of depression wash over her at the thought of all the problems that had been sitting there waiting for them on their return. And all the greater ones that she had created in her absence. And then she looked at Ed, who was helping Tanzie with her bag, and laughing at something Nicky said, leaning over to hear him better, and it passed.

He had stopped at a DIY superstore about an hour out of town – his detour – emerging with a great box of stuff that he had to wrestle into the back alongside their bags. It was possible he needed to tidy his house before he sold it. Jess couldn’t think what you would do to that house to make it any nicer.

He dropped the last of the bags by the front door and stood there, holding the cardboard box. The children had disappeared immediately to their rooms, like creatures in some sort of homing experiment. Jess felt embarrassed then by the cluttered little house, the woodchip wallpaper, the long row of battered paperbacks that snaked along the hall.

‘I’m going back to my dad’s tomorrow.’

A reflexive twinge at the thought of his absence. ‘Good. That’s good.’

‘Just for a few days. Until the police thing. But I thought I’d put these up first.’

Jess looked down at the boxes.

‘Security camera and motion-activated light. It shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours.’

‘You bought that for us?’

‘Nicky got beaten up. Tanzie plainly doesn’t feel safe. I thought it would make you all feel better. You know … if I’m not here.’

She stared at the box, at what it meant. She felt suddenly overwhelmed by the fact that this man had considered these things and wanted to protect them. She spoke before she knew what she wanted to say. ‘You – you don’t have to do that,’ she stammered. ‘I’m good at DIY. I’ll do it.’

‘On a ladder. With a busted foot.’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘You know, Jessica Rae Thomas, at some point you’re going to have to let someone help you.’

‘At some point you’re going to have to stop calling me Jessica Rae Thomas.’

‘I can’t help it. I like it.’

She liked it too. ‘Well, what shall I do, then?’

‘Sit down. Stay still. Put your injured foot up. And then afterwards I’ll walk into town with Nicky and we’ll buy a disgustingly unhealthy waste-of-money takeaway because it might be the last one I get for a while. And then we’ll sit here and eat it and afterwards you and I will lie around gazing in awe at the size of each other’s stomachs.’

‘Oh, my God, I love it when you talk dirty.’

So she sat. Doing nothing. On her own sofa. And Tanzie came and sat with her for a while and Ed went up a ladder outside and waved the drill at her through the window and pretended that he was going to fall off until it made her anxious. ‘I’ve been in two different hospitals in eight days,’ she yelled at him through the window, crossly. ‘I do not want to make it a third.’ And then, because she was not very good at sitting still, she sorted some dirty washing and put a load in, but after that she sat down again and just let everyone else move because she had to admit that resting her foot was a lot less painful than trying to do things on it.

And there was something so good about having everyone just potter around her, listening to the sound of Ed’s drill and catching his eye through the window as he attached the camera and called at her to come, come and look. She couldn’t remember the last time someone had done something to the house and it hadn’t been her. ‘Is that okay?’

She limped outside to see him. He stood back on the garden path, gazing up at the front of the house. ‘I figured if I put it there it’ll catch anyone who comes not just in your front garden but who hangs around outside. It’s got a convex lens, see?’ She tried to look interested. She was wondering whether once the children had gone to bed she could persuade him to stay over.

‘And often, with these sorts of things, you find that just having a camera there is a deterrent.’

Would it really be that bad? He could always sneak out before they woke up. But, then, who were they really kidding? Nicky and Tanzie must have guessed something was going on, surely.

‘Jess?’

He was standing in front of her.

‘Mm?’

‘All I have to do is drill a hole there, and feed the wires in through that wall. Hopefully I can put a little junction just inside and it should be fairly simple to connect it all up.’

He wore the satisfied look that men assume when in possession of power tools. He patted his pocket, checking for screws, then looked at her carefully. ‘Were you listening to a single thing I’ve said?’

Jess grinned at him guiltily.

‘Oh, you’re incorrigible,’ he said, after a minute. ‘Honestly.’

Glancing around to make sure nobody was looking, he hooked his arm gently around her neck, pulled her close and kissed her. His chin was thick with stubble. ‘Now let me get on. Undistracted. Go and dig out that takeaway menu.’

Jess limped, grinning, into the kitchen, and began rootling through the drawers. She couldn’t remember the last time she had ordered a takeaway. She was pretty sure none of the menus were up to date. Ed went upstairs to connect up the wiring. He shouted down that he was going to need to move some furniture to get at the skirting.

‘Fine by me,’ she yelled back. She heard the rumbling, thunderous sound of large things being dragged around the floor above her head, as he tried to access the electricity, and marvelled again that somebody other than her was going to do it.