She looks at the canvas again and places it back on the easel. ‘I see what you mean,’ she says, throwing a snort in his direction.
She used to paint a lot of dogs before she became a super recogniser. Not by choice. When the portrait commissions dried up, she had no option. Labradors mainly. The occasional retriever. A few racehorses too. The price she paid for living in Wiltshire. Now, it seems, she can’t even do dogs.
‘Hockney painted forty-five pictures of his dachshunds,’ a soft Irish voice says behind her.
She spins around to see Rob leaning against the bedroom doorway to her left, a tennis racquet in one hand.
‘Took him a long while to get it right. Easels all over the house, apparently,’ he adds.
Rob practises with a machine when he’s down here, out on the court at the rear of the house. Two hundred balls on his backhand before breakfast. He peels off an electronic bandana, no doubt another piece of wearable technology he’s testing. Kate takes in his sweaty smile, his windblown, tousled hair. Something’s wrong. He folds his arms approvingly, glancing out to sea and then back at her, before looking at his trainers. He usually does that when he’s trying to get her into bed. One moment pleading, the next all bashful. But then he fixes her in the eye.
‘I know it’s taken time,’ he says, ‘but you’re looking so much better, Kate. And that necklace – it really suits you.’
The necklace. She raises a hand to touch it, remembering the pinch of pain, and time seems to slow down. She stares at him, his familiar face, his blinking puppy eyes, but she no longer recognises him. Her brain tingles, like déjà vu, but this is different, the opposite feeling. It’s as if she’s never seen this man before.
‘Kate?’ he says. His voice is far away, distorted. ‘You OK?’
She can feel the mug slipping through her fingers, but she can’t do anything about it. It falls and shatters on the concrete floor, splashing tea over her bare toes. Stretch trots off to another room.
‘Are you hurt?’ he asks, rushing forward, his hands on her shoulders as he kicks away a jagged shard of mug from her feet.
She shakes her head slowly, still staring at him, reality fracturing around her. Rob holds her close but it only makes things worse. Who is this person? She feels disorientated, nauseous, disconnected – from Rob, the house, her life, as if she’s suddenly watching herself from a distance.
‘You’ve been overdoing it, that’s all,’ Rob says, glancing at the canvas. ‘When did you get up?’
‘Just after you went out,’ she manages to say. What’s wrong with her?
‘You mustn’t push it,’ he says, leading her through to the bedroom, where he closes the curtains and switches off the light. She’s suffering from a migraine, he thinks, and needs to rest in darkness. She had a lot of headaches in the immediate aftermath of the accident, but none recently.
Once she’s settled in bed and he’s brought her a mug of herbal tea, he sits by her feet, one hand resting on her legs as he goes through emails and messages on his phone. Normality starts to return. Is this how it’s going to be from now on? Irrational, late-night thoughts about doppelgängers? Weirdness creeping up on her when she least expects it, reminding her that she’ll never be fully herself again?
‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘The painting – it’s just taking so long to come back.’
But she can’t help worrying that it’s something else. The feeling when she saw him in the kitchen and thought he was a different person – it was so strange, sickening. The world seemed to split in two. Rob looked the same, but something – her instincts? her old self? her imagination? – was telling her that it wasn’t him.
‘Patience,’ he says, leaning over to kiss her.
Rob loves her work and is determined that she’ll be a fulltime artist again. He knows that she never wants to return to her police job. She doesn’t want to let him down. Maybe she has been pushing it recently.
‘Art’s the best healer,’ he’d said that day they first met on the ward, lingering to chat at her bedside. ‘Art and technology.’
When she was strong enough to walk down to the exhibition he’d organised in the hospital foyer, she was amazed to discover three of her own portraits on the walls. And she can’t deny that her euphoria at seeing them on display worked more wonders than any medicine. Two years earlier, she’d been let go by her own gallery, forced to take up a proper job with the police and ditch her career as an artist. It had been a while since she’d had any work shown in public.
‘I don’t think it’s a migraine,’ she says.
‘You just need to sleep.’
She knows he’s right. But she’s not sure she can face more dreams about Rob being replaced by a stranger.
4
Kate
When Kate wakes from a light sleep, Rob is still at the end of the bed in his tennis gear, checking his phone, getting up to walk around in circles, settling again. A bit like Stretch. Sometimes she thinks he has enough energy and ideas to solve all the world’s problems.
‘Rob…’ she says, but before he can reply, his phone rings.
‘You OK?’ he mouths to her, one hand over his phone. She nods and he walks out of the bedroom onto the terrace.
Kate closes her eyes again and lies back, listening to his animated tones as he talks about an upcoming ‘IPO’ in language that she barely understands. The mindless ‘spray and pray’ of some tech venture capitalists. The need for algorithms and the human brain to work in partnership, his hopes for a new project in Brittany.
Her name is mentioned, but his voice drops and she can’t make out exactly what he’s saying. And then she hears him again, cold and dispassionate, like she’s never heard him before, ordering someone to ‘boil the ocean’ for new customers. She guesses he has to be tough at work, not like how he is with her, but his tone is surprising. Two minutes later, he ducks back into the room and pulls out a familiar headset from a cupboard. Rob recently launched a disruptive medical start-up that makes portable headsets for assessing traumatic brain injuries. He gets her to wear one occasionally to help monitor her recovery.
‘There’s a problem in London,’ he says. ‘An unhappy investor.’
‘Do you need to go back?’ she asks.
The thought of being on her own again is suddenly very appealing. She feels guilty, but she needs to work out what’s happening in her head, why she dropped the mug when she looked at Rob. It was a step back, to when she was first recovering down here and dizzy spells and migraines were part of her life.
‘I told them it would have to wait until Monday,’ he says.
‘Because of me?’
‘I can’t leave you like this,’ he says, adjusting the headset in the dim light. He explained once how it works. Apparently, it uses algorithms to compare a patient’s brain activity against normal data and then highlights any deviations.
‘I’m fine. Really.’ Kate ties back her hair. ‘You should go.’
‘Let’s just check,’ he says. ‘Peace of mind.’
She sits up in bed, keeping her eyes firmly closed as he slides the device over her head. It looks a bit like a swimming cap, except for the matrix of colour-coded electrodes all over it. When he’s being tender like this, tucking her hair behind an ear as he adjusts the headset, she feels so loved, cared for, cherished. No pinched skin.