A Trick of the Mind

By Penny Hancock

12 min read

Why does it matter? Because the guilt you carry to protect yourself is exactly what makes you exploitable.

We assume conscience keeps us safe — that the person tormented by guilt, who goes back to check, who cannot leave harm unaddressed, is somehow protected by their own decency. Penny Hancock's novel destroys that assumption. Ellie has spent her whole life performing rituals against disaster: three taps on a gatepost, three looks over her shoulder, the compulsion to turn the car around. These habits were born the day a six-year-old was screamed at for failing to prevent a drowning she had no power to stop. Decades later, that same wiring — the desperate need to check, to atone, to stay — delivers her into the hands of someone who has been waiting for exactly this kind of woman. The damage we carry doesn't protect us. It makes us readable. And some people know how to read.

The Night She Decided Not to Turn Back

Ellie is driving a dark Suffolk lane, Beyoncé turned up loud, her neighbour's terrier with his paws on the dashboard, when the car jolts sideways and she feels her pulse kick. There's a branch down across the road — she can see it in the mirror, storm debris. She drives on. What matters is what she doesn't do: she doesn't turn round.

She has turned round before. Many times. After wind rocked the car, after an amber light, whenever the thought surfaced that she might have hurt someone, she would find a place to turn, drive back, confirm there was nothing there, and continue. She knew this about herself. The thought was a compulsion she'd been feeding for years, and refusing it — pressing on down the dark lane — is something she frames, consciously, as growth. She is done with old habits. She is casting off the anxious person she was with Finn and driving toward a new version of herself.

Half an hour later she is upstairs in her late aunt's seaside cottage, half out of her dress, when a radio presenter mentions a hit-and-run on the A1095 at around eight thirty that evening. A pedestrian is in hospital in critical condition. Police are appealing for witnesses.

Everything Ellie filed away as nerves — damp palms she attributed to excitement about seeing old friends, a dark stain on her hip she assumed was cooking oil, a low-level dread she kept talking herself past — reorganises itself into evidence. The car had jolted. There had been a jogger on the verge when she'd first turned off the main road, wearing nothing reflective. She had thought, at the time, how invisible he was.

She hadn't gone back. The act she celebrated as self-improvement is the same act that may have left someone dying on a country road. The novel's entire psychological machinery — guilt, doubt, the question of whether her anxiety was disorder or instinct — runs off this single decision, made in the dark, in the name of getting better.

The Compulsion She Inherited from Childhood Was Never About the Car

Ellie's checking rituals did not begin with cars or country roads. They began with a gatepost. Every visit to her aunt's Suffolk cottage as a child, she would tap the post a precise number of times before passing through. Look over her shoulder three times whenever a dark thought arrived. Check outside the window before settling anywhere. She invented these rituals herself, which is worth sitting with — a small child, constructing a private system of magical bargains because she understood, at some level she could not yet name, that Aunty May was fragile in ways adults weren't admitting. If the rituals held, May would live. When May died anyway, by her own hand, two empty pill bottles on the nightstand, the entire architecture of Ellie's anxiety lost its original object and went looking for a new one.

May had a metaphor for it. Taking the children to see insects trapped in amber at a local museum, she'd tell them that certain moments are perfect, glowing with an almost unearthly light — but you have to beware, because sometimes a creature gets caught in the resin while it's still soft, and what preserves it also imprisons it forever. She meant this as a caution about beauty. It turns out it was also a description of Ellie. The rituals that were meant to keep May safe hardened around her, and when May died the compulsion didn't dissolve — it transferred. The hit-and-run becomes the new gatepost: something to tap, return to, verify. Ellie even recognises this about herself. She knows she cannot always tell the difference between rational concern and the old loop pulling her back. That confusion is the point. The right person, arriving with the right knowledge, could walk straight in.

She Went to the Hospital to Ease Her Conscience and Never Left

What if the visit was never about Patrick at all? Ellie tells herself she is going to ease her conscience — she has struck a private bargain: if he's dying, she'll go to the police; if he's going to be fine, she'll put on the new dress, attend her gallery opening, and step into the life she has been assembling since she left Finn. This has the shape of conscience. But watch what she actually does.

She arrives on a Saturday morning, tells the nurse she is Patrick's girlfriend, and is shown to his room. Nobody checks. When the nurse mentions amnesia and asks about photos, she rummages through her bag and produces her phone without quite deciding to. She rifles through his locker — wallet, iPhone, evidence of yachting friends and a recent flight from Corfu — building a portrait of a man she has no right to be examining. Then a small Filipino nurse mentions that the police have two suspects and believe it was a deliberate attack following a pub fight. Ellie's relief is physical: her limbs go loose, the guilt releasing its grip all at once. She whispers a farewell to the unconscious man, invites him to visit her aunt's blue house in Southwold when he recovers, and turns to leave.

Then he speaks. She almost convinces herself she imagined it. She did not.

She goes back. And days later, Patrick pulls the sheet off his legs to show her something she was not prepared for. She had expected a cast, maybe dressings. What she sees is a leg ending at the knee. She flees to the hospital bathroom, vomits, stands gripping the basin until the shaking slows. Then she goes back to his bedside. Patrick's amnesia has swallowed the weeks around the accident; he believes she is his girlfriend — the hospital staff described a small, dark, wavy-haired woman who visited the morning after he was admitted, and he had rung the number in the diary she accidentally left behind. He has no other visitors. He tells her he cannot manage alone.

Ellie lies down beside him on the narrow hospital bed, a few centimetres of air between them, and tells herself she is applying a principle from dementia care — you don't shatter a patient's comforting delusion, you play along. Patrick is not demented. His amnesia is specific and almost certainly temporary. But the rationalisation feels, from the inside, exactly like compassion. Her rituals always felt like reasonable caution. Her guilt about the road always felt like conscience. Now staying feels like care. The novel's real trap is not the hit-and-run. It is this room — the moment she chose not to correct his mistake and became the person he needed her to be.

Patrick Didn't Seduce Ellie. He Read Her Architecture.

Patrick knows she hit him. He has always known. The amnesia, the warm bewilderment, the artless flattery — your wild dark hair, your funny crooked smile — was a performance calibrated for an audience of one.

Consider what happens in that hospital bed. Patrick reconstructs the evening with surgical precision: the pub in Blythburgh, the argument, the walk along the road, the silvery blue car the size of a Corsa or a Micra. He watches Ellie's face while he talks. Then, when she presses him — you said it was blue, you remembered the colour — he retreats: 'Did I? I keep getting so confused.' He had already told the police he couldn't remember any details. He had already instructed them to drop the investigation. A man genuinely unable to recall what hit him does not first describe it with precision and then, when questioned, perform confusion. He was testing her. When she didn't confess, he knew the shape of what he was working with.

The 'What's happened, has happened' speech, delivered with its self-help cadences about challenges and learning opportunities, is not stoicism. It is a lock being turned. By declining to pursue justice — and going further, by actively misleading police — Patrick places Ellie in an impossible position. She cannot report herself to an investigation he has shut down without also destroying him. She cannot leave without confirming she was never there out of love. She can only stay and earn forgiveness she is never quite allowed to finish asking for.

Every subsequent gift tightens the structure. The free studio at Trinity Buoy Wharf. The restaurant evenings, the champagne, the contacts in New York. The apartment, the role of carer, the title of girlfriend — offered not as generosity but as architecture. Ellie tells her flatmate Chiara that Patrick must see her painting as an investment, that they'll be of mutual benefit. She is trying to describe a business arrangement and talk herself out of noticing it feels like debt. It does feel like debt, because it is.

Meanwhile Patrick is already revealing that he grew up in Southwold. He knows about May — the foster children, the drowning, the psychiatric hospital. He knows details about the cottage that Ellie cannot remember sharing. He knows the amber metaphor May taught her as a child — perfect moments that also imprison — and steps into it deliberately: the resin soft around her, hardening.

Coercive Control Looks Like Love Until You Notice What It Requires You to Abandon

The night Patrick delivers his ultimatum, he frames it as devotion. Ellie's friends are dead weight who hold her back; together, the two of them are on the edge of something extraordinary; he simply wants her entirely. While he speaks, he's pressing her so tightly against him that the breath leaves her body — and then, almost in the same motion, he begins kissing her face with such slow tenderness that she finds herself without the will to push back. That twinning is the mechanism: the physical compression and the soft mouth, the demand and the gentleness arriving together so that the kiss absorbs the ultimatum, turns it sweet in the mouth before she's understood what she's swallowed. What Ellie experiences is not a threat. It registers as love. She can go to teach, he tells her, she can take her father his shopping — but then straight back. The studio he's given her, the contacts in New York, the champagne on the balcony: all of it was infrastructure, and now he's explaining the terms.

The real measure of what this costs her arrives not at his apartment but at her school, the morning after. She finds a pink mark beneath her ear and retrieves, dimly, the memory attached to it: Patrick's thumb pressing against her throat in the dark, his voice asking whether she would ever leave him. She covers it with concealer and goes in to learn that Timothy — a seven-year-old with a speech difficulty who had been trying to tell her about violence at home — walked back alone on Friday and found his stepfather beating his mother badly enough to put her in hospital. She had left early to get back to Patrick. She had seen a girl's back in the playground and driven away without speaking to her, because she wanted to keep him sweet.

Ellie is, in that moment, simultaneously the person being controlled and the person whose distraction has caused harm to a child — victim and perpetrator sharing the same body, the same morning, the same concealer-covered bruise. The novel doesn't let her, or you, look away from that. The cost of her entrapment is not abstract. It has a name, an age, and a newly acquired silence.

The Wound That Made Her Vulnerable Was Inflicted When She Was Six Years Old

A September afternoon, the light pink and deceptive, and May has left three children on a jetty while she runs to the beach hut for a paint tube. Five minutes. She tells the six-year-old, Ellie, to watch the small girl Daisy — the child she is fostering — while also holding her toddler brother Ben's hand. Both at once, from a child who cannot be in two places. Daisy chases an escaping crab over the edge of the jetty. When May returns, there is only a blue bucket, dripping.

Ellie's father sits on a sofa in his council flat, Lou Reed fading on the turntable, and reads his daughter the diary entry May wrote for her psychiatrist, Dr Lipski: that Ellie was the reason Daisy drowned. Ellie's mother had asked him to burn those pages. He hadn't. Now he unfolds them and hands them over, and the explanation is worse than anything Ellie had imagined — she had been cut out of family photographs, literally excised, by the aunt she remembered as warmth and safety, because that aunt had looked for somewhere to put an unbearable guilt and found a six-year-old child shaped exactly right.

Her father is clear: there were witnesses. Ellie had done precisely what her parents always told her — never let go of Ben's hand near water. May knew this. What she couldn't survive was her own culpability for leaving them all unsupervised, so she handed the guilt to someone too small to refuse it. The screaming she did into Ellie's face that afternoon — you should have checked on her, like I told you to, you should have checked — lodged on a loop that never stopped playing. Ellie didn't consciously remember the scene. But her body had been running the error-correction ever since: tap the gatepost, look over your shoulder three times, check behind the car, go back and verify. Every ritual was an attempt to undo that original failure — to be, this time, the child who checked.

Patrick didn't create the wound. He located it, took its measure, and walked in. The guilt-driven hospital visits, the inability to leave, the readiness to carry blame that wasn't hers — all of it was already in place, installed by a screaming woman on a shingle beach, the afternoon a six-year-old held her brother's hand and watched a little girl go over the edge of a jetty into the dark water below.

Every Ritual She Built to Prevent Harm Brought Her to the Harm She Feared

The novel's central trick is not Patrick. It is Ellie's own mind, running so faithfully against catastrophe that it generates one.

Watch the logic complete itself at Trinity Buoy Wharf. Ellie spent months trying to atone for a hit-and-run she didn't cause — visiting the hospital, lying down on a stranger's narrow bed, absorbing his debt and his blame — because she couldn't trust a dark Suffolk lane and drive away. Every gesture of guilt-driven care tightened the trap: the studio, the credit card fraud she overlooked, the relationship she stayed in because leaving felt like abandonment. And then Patrick locks her in a shipping container, slashes her painting to ribbons, wraps her dog in parcel tape. She escapes using the magnets she had fixed to her walls as a private ritual against harm — cold and fridge-smooth under her fingers — and she hides in a lighthouse where the same music loops around and around. When she finally runs for her car, she cannot stop what happens next. The keys are still in the ignition because she had intended to be straight back. The car accelerates across the wharf and strikes Patrick full on, his body rising with his prosthetic leg spinning free, arms out like a seagull riding a thermal.

She cannot scream a warning. Patrick had strangled her. Her voice is gone.

She sits down on the ground and holds his head as he dies. Not the man, she thinks — the abandoned boy. Patrick, who was left behind, who turned his abandonment into a logic as closed and self-defeating as her own. Every action Ellie took to investigate the first accident, to make amends, to stay, to survive, fed directly into making this one happen. The compulsion she mistook for conscience was the mechanism all along. She had spent her life tapping gateposts to keep the people she loved safe. The tap itself had set everything in motion.

The Gatepost She Finally Didn't Tap

There is a particular cruelty to the way protective habits can become the instrument of what they're guarding against — not despite their sincerity, but because of it. Ellie didn't tap that gatepost to cause harm. She did it to confirm she was someone who might. That distinction is everything. Every ritual, every hospital visit, every decision to stay was a vote for the same story: I am the person standing between others and disaster, and if I stop watching, someone will fall. The compulsion she mistook for conscience was the mechanism all along. Patrick didn't need to invent that belief. He just needed to walk away and leave it room to breathe. The terrible logic the novel leaves you with is this: the catastrophe arrived precisely because she cared so hard and so faithfully. Not in spite of the vigilance. Through it. Which means the question she has to live with — and leaves you holding — isn't whether she could have done more. It's whether she might have done less.