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dunes. ‘It’s really atmospheric here. Inspiring for you.’
    ‘I knew you’d get it.’
    ‘I think it’s the thresholds you get here, the border between land and sea, sea and sky, life and death. The kind of themes you use in your work. A liminal landscape.’
    ‘Exactly! And what I want to do too, is somehow show the layers beneath what we see?’
    She turned and grinned. ‘I’ve hardly done any work over the last few months. You’re way ahead of me,’ she said.
    ‘Oh, I don’t know about that,’ I said.
    ‘Right! I want to get out there,’ Liam said. ‘Are you girls coming? Shall we take Pepper, if you’re busy at the gallery? A walk in this sea breeze will shift the
hangover, won’t it, hey, Pepper?’ Pepper jumped up and snaffled at Liam’s hand, his tail going madly.
    ‘The forecast’s good,’ said Guy, looking at his phone. ‘It’s going to warm up by lunchtime. Though what warm means here is anyone’s guess.’ He looked up
at us all and grinned and Louise moved away from the window and leant over him, wrapping her arms round his chest and kissing his hair. I might be moving up in the art world but she had found love.
Why was it so difficult to get all three right? – the relationship, the work, the house?
    I told my friends I was popping to Ipswich to get some extra magnets to hang paintings.
    ‘Try not to be too long,’ Chiara said. ‘I know you’re nervous about tonight, I can see it. But everything’s going to be fine. I’ll sort everything else so
that you can focus on your viewers.’
    ‘Thanks, Chiara.’
    ‘
Prego!
’ she said. ‘You know me, nothing I like better than an event to sort.’
    I looked into her big brown concerned eyes.
    I could talk to Chiara about the hit-and-run now. I could ask her, so do you think it’s possible it might have been me, and Chiara would say, ‘No, honey, don’t be daft.’
Or she would say, ‘Look, if you go to the police you’ll be wasting their time. You know this is crazy, don’t you? You would know if you’d hit someone.’
    ‘But there was a jolt,’ I’d say. ‘I remember a jolt on the road that I ignored! The music was on loud. I was talking to Pepper. Then there was blood on the
bonnet!’
    ‘A body would make more than a jolt,’ she would insist. ‘You would have seen it.’
    ‘In the dark? While I was looking the other way?’
    Instead I said I’d see them later and watched them walk away.
    I knew what I was going to do. The thought had come to me, loud and clear.
    I should have gone back and checked. But it isn’t too late. I can go to him and find out how bad it really is.
    If he is going to die, if he’s critically injured, though God forbid, I have to tell the police I might have hit him.
    It is the right thing to do.
    But if he’s OK, I can forget all about it, come back, get ready for tonight, put on the new dress, go to the Private View, take the first steps into my new life as a proper working
artist. Without Finn.
    I didn’t give it any more thought. I locked the door, got into my car.
    As I drove away from town I was overcome by envy for my friends and their freedom. I had a horrible presentiment that what I was doing was going to intefere with my plans. That it would take me
away, not just from my tired old ways – the things I wanted to move on from – but from everything that was precious to me too, and that I’d never get back. My friends were walking
along the shore with my dog, on their way for a lunchtime drink. The perfect spring weekend that I had planned and envisaged.
    While I was about to find out whether I’d killed someone.

CHAPTER SIX
    I wasn’t sure if the hospital would let me in. I didn’t know what the rules were these days, about visiting times, about who they did and didn’t allow in. And
all I had was a name. Nothing to prove that I might actually know or be related to him.
    I hated hospitals. The facelessness of them. The long corridors. The blue signs. I was