The shower curtain crinkled when I touched it. The metal rings jostled on the rail.
A pause, and then I steadied my hand and thrust it aside.
And fell . . .
. . . half forwards through a flash of white light into the space in front of me . . .
. . . half backwards into my mind.
I was staring at a shower cubicle. A makeshift one. It was formed out of a knee-high slab of white porcelain that had long ago been installed in the corner of the room. There was a removable showerhead fitted to a sliding wall bar above it that looked a lot more recent. A cold tap and a hot tap.
The porcelain tray was chunky and deep, the glaze rubbed bare in patches, yellowed with water stains in others. The once-white metro tiles fitted to the walls were crackled and greyed.
Looking at it, I felt certain it hadn’t started out as a shower.
Once, perhaps, it would have been used by a servant as a sluice. Nowadays, I imagined Bethany would have pitched it to a potential buyer as a dog shower.
But I knew differently.
Because what I was seeing in front of me, in this moment, I was simultaneously seeing in snatches from my blurred and shattered memories.
A torturous, disabling sensation.
Instantly impossible.
Indisputably real.
Because I understood instinctively – in the same way I knew how to breathe – that what I was looking at was a bathroom that hadn’t really been a bathroom, where I’d been attacked by a stranger who hadn’t been a stranger at all.
That dark, blurred figure.
That rasping metallic voice.
‘I’ve been watching you.’
Oh God.
It hadn’t happened at the party with Oliver.
It had happened afterwards, here, in this house, with Sam.