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he found his tongue to speak.
    ‘Worried about you?’ he said, his words coming out in a raging flow. ‘Worried about you? I thought you were dead! Do you hear me? Dead! I imagined you lying cold on a verge. I pictured you cold in a mortuary. For two weeks I could not sleep for the nightmares. So no, I wasn’t worried about you. It was much worse than that.’
    For a moment he thought he caught a flicker of distress on her face before her now familiar insouciance replaced it. ‘I apologise if I caused you any distress...’
    Slam!
    Without conscious thought, the desperate need to purge the storm of emotions acted for him and he punched the wall.
    ‘You haven’t got a clue, have you?’ he raged. ‘I thought we were happy. When you went missing, I thought you’d been kidnapped but when I received no ransom I thought you had been killed. I called your mother, I called Cara—neither of them had heard from you. Or so they said. It never crossed my mind you would do something so wicked as to up and leave without a word.’ He threw his arms out, ignoring the pain in his shoulder, ignoring the throb in his fist. ‘You didn’t just leave me, you left everything, all your work, all your clothes...’
    In the midst of his fury he saw how white she had become, how she clung to her workbench as if she depended on it to keep her upright.
    Taking a deep, ragged breath, he fought for control and forced his voice to adopt a modicum of calm. ‘Two weeks after you went missing, your bank statement arrived. I opened it and found every euro had been transferred into a new account the same day you disappeared. Do you know how I felt then?’
    Slowly, she shook her head.
    ‘Elated. Suddenly there existed the possibility you were alive. Until then it hadn’t even occurred to me to check the safe for your passport.’ When he had discovered it missing, the relief had been so physical he had slumped to the floor and buried his head in his hands, sitting there for minutes that had felt like hours, his usually quick brain taking its time to process the implications. But once he had processed them...
    He had dug up all her bank statements and read them in detail. Apart from the odd splurge on painting materials, Grace had hardly touched the allowance he gave her. Over a two-year period she had accumulated more than two million euros.
    Had she been planning her escape from the start?
    Whatever the reason, his wife had saved enough money to start over.
    From then, it had been a case of following the money trail. Luckily for him, money—his money—was able to lubricate the tightest of lips and within a day he had been in Frankfurt. Unluckily for him, he had been a week too late. She had already gone. It had taken another four months for him to find her latest location but he had been too late then too.
    In the meantime, Pepe had come up trumps with Cara’s phone, through which they’d determined what they had good reason to believe was Grace’s number. That same number had remained inactive until barely a fortnight ago.
    ‘You put me through hell,’ he said flatly. ‘I would have gladly traded my life for yours and you let me believe you were dead. Now tell me why I don’t deserve some answers.’
    ‘I was going to leave you a note,’ she said. For the first time he detected a softening in her voice. ‘But I couldn’t risk you coming home early and finding it before I had a chance to leave Sicily. I knew you would never let me go.’
    ‘What kind of a monster do you think I am?’ he asked, throwing his arms back in the air. ‘That argument we had before you disappeared? Was that the cause of it?’
    ‘No! That row—as horrible as it was, I would have forgiven it in time...’
    ‘So tell me! When, exactly, did I frighten you so much that you believed I would stop you doing anything?’
    ‘That’s just it! You never let me do anything.’ She threw her own arms in the air. ‘You promised I could exhibit my work in Palermo