‘GET out. Just get out.’

He heard the words before he awoke. They echoed in the darkness behind his eyes, screaming around his head like curses.

Then his eyes were open and he was sitting up in bed, trying to understand the world around him. He didn’t know where he was. Surely this was his home back in London, but where was she? Why not in bed with him?

Then the haze cleared, the walls fell into place. He was back at his parents’ home, the Villa Rinucci in southern Italy, a place where he hadn’t lived for years.

Now he was using it as a refuge until he could clear his head. Nothing had been straight in his mind since the day Celia had thrown him out. Somehow he’d organised himself, agreed to return to Naples to set up the Italian branch of his firm, and left England. There had been one brief meeting with Celia when he’d collected his things, but they had spoken to each other like strangers, and he hadn’t seen her again. She was behind him. Finished. Over and done with.

Except that her cry of ‘Get out!’ still echoed with him, day and night. And the worst thing, the thing that actually scared him, was that it wasn’t only her voice he heard. It was as though someone had cast a malign spell, triggered by those words and those alone. And he couldn’t escape.

Francesco got out of bed and went to the window, seeing the dawn beginning to break over the Bay of Naples. As he sat there, unwilling to return to bed and risk a repetition of the nightmare, he heard a soft footstep in the corridor outside and knew that it was Hope, refusing to accept that a man in his late-thirties didn’t need to be hovered over protectively by his mother.

He heard her stop outside his door and waited with dread for the knock. He loved his mother, but he shrank from the questions he couldn’t answer because he didn’t want to face them.