Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Fancy another escapist read?

Chapter One – It Started With a Kiss by Miranda Dickinson

Acknowledgements

Copyright

About the Publisher

Dedication

For Louis, with whom I

can barely wait to dance.

Chapter One

Monday, 22 August

As she opened the door Ava could see the floor was covered in flowers: unopened peonies in tight pink balls, crisp white lilies, their stamens bristling with pollen and a bank of roses, almost mocking in their velvety glamour. Taking a deep breath to enjoy the aromatic mixture their scents made, she stepped over buckets of daisies to reach her desk. She hung up her coat, flicked the kettle on and flipped open her laptop. While the kettle boiled, she flicked through her post – the usual selection of bills and junk mail, along with a flyer for new classes at the Arts Centre. There wasn’t really anything worth opening or reading properly before she had a cup of tea on the go, so she stared absentmindedly at the flowers as the comforting sound of the kettle grew louder and louder. They were lined up according to type and colour, creating an extravagant floral carpet. Ava knew it would take her another few minutes to start to feel fully awake and was glad of some time alone with the shop.

She swirled a teabag around in the water, wondering if Rob was up yet. He had taken to staying at her house more and more lately, although whether his motivation was the prospect of cosy evenings together or being closer to his office was unclear. Either way, he had been dead to the world when she left the house – completely still and snoring lightly, despite the clatter of her Monday morning routine. Ava wondered if he was even awake yet, if he had discovered the cup of tea she left by his bedside, or if he was still curled up in her bed, leaving his imprint on her pillow.

‘Morning, Boss!’ Matt had arrived and was standing in the doorway, a bucket of flowers already under each arm. ‘Had a good weekend?’

‘Yes thanks, Matt, nothing special,’ she replied. She repeated those last two words to herself: nothing special. ‘You?’

‘Oh yeah, it was wicked!’ Matt was grinning at the memory and it wasn’t even nine o’clock yet. Was he immune to Monday mornings? If he wasn’t a little sluggish at this point in the week, when was he? ‘We went down to the coast for a bit of surfing, had a barbecue – good times, amazing waves.’

Well over 10 years younger than her, Matt seemed to have boundless energy and an insatiable appetite for fun. Even a spare half hour would be filled with some kind of sporting activity, an impromptu burst of socialising or a quick trip somewhere. He was no sofa surfer; indeed TV seemed to hold no allure for him at all. Just hearing about his hectic social life made Ava feel slightly dizzy, but he was so good-natured it was hard to begrudge him a moment of it. Truly, he was a gift. She smiled to herself as he put the first two buckets of flowers up onto the highest bracket of the shelving unit, whistling, then immediately turned round to reach for the rest.

‘Look at these!’ he said as he picked up the roses, holding them admiringly with outstretched arms as if they were Liz Taylor herself, ready to dance. ‘They’re gorgeous today – I wonder where they’ll be ending up …’ He winked at Ava and she rolled her eyes. Relatively new to the job, he was still enthused by almost every part of his work at Dunne’s. ‘Although, you’ve got to wonder – what’s a man doing buying red roses on a Monday if he’s not a little bit guilty about something?’

‘Oh come on, so young and already such a cynic! Maybe some men are just impulsive or romantic. I wouldn’t keep ordering them for a Monday if they didn’t sell.’ She gave him a playful cuff over the head and he ducked, giggling.

‘They sell alright,’ replied Matt with a wink, ‘but to romantic men … or those in the doghouse?’

‘Stop it – that’s too depressing!’

‘Only kidding,’ he said, as he finally hung up his jacket. But Ava suspected he wasn’t. She shook herself, trying to get rid of the leaden Monday morning blues she still felt.

‘Right, you – a cup of tea?’

‘Go on, then. I reckon it’s going to be busy for a Monday.’

For the next few minutes they worked alongside each other in companionable silence. Matt knew where the usual spots for all of the flowers were and neatly moved bunches from the plastic buckets in which they had been left to the smarter tin pails they were displayed in. More delicate blooms were stacked on wooden shelves across the main sidewall of the shop and he took the smaller, almost wine-bucket size pails outside onto the street. Daffodils, sunflowers and sturdy tulips were all arranged on the pavement beneath the shop window, with Matt whistling along to the radio as he worked. Ava made his milky tea and handed it to him before checking off deliveries against the invoice left three hours earlier.

‘Something’s missing,’ said Matt, as he nodded to thank Ava for the mug she had just passed him.

‘The sweet peas are late.’

Unlike the more exotic flowers that Dunne’s stocked, the sweet peas were not imported from abroad, but delivered sporadically by a local farm. They tended to swing by and drop off a supply whenever they felt the shop needed them, paying little heed to such trivialities as whether or not Ava actually needed them, or had indeed ordered them. But Ava couldn’t bring herself to start ordering them from elsewhere. She loved the area, having grown up just outside of Salisbury, and stocking local flowers was important to her. It made no sense to have spent her childhood playing in the fields of the West Country and then to import absolutely everything from elsewhere once she had her own business in the area.

When she left college and headed off to London with dreams of a career arranging cutting-edge displays for celebrity events and society weddings, she had wanted little to do with the gentler countryside flowers such as blowsy roses, peonies and sweet peas. After over a decade of providing breath-taking arrangements for corporate receptions only to watch city brokers and their nonchalant PAs walk past completely oblivious to their beauty, she began to tire of wasting her best work on an audience who cared so little. The breaking point had been the week when she worked her fingers raw on a series of jaw-dropping displays for the awards ceremony of a glossy magazine. Held in an echoing warehouse somewhere near the Docklands, she had led a team spending 18-hour days to transform the imposing concrete structure into a venue where pop princesses, rock icons and supermodels alike would be happy to pose and party against a backdrop befitting them. Exhausted, but aglow with the satisfaction of a job well done, Ava had left the building only to wake to a series of charmless tabloid photographs of a well-oiled soap starlet flicking her cigarette into one of her red ginger and anthurium arrangements before collapsing into another – apparently fuelled by a lethal combination of four-inch fluoro heels and limitless free fizz.

‘At least your work has been in the papers,’ was her ever-pragmatic younger sister Lauren’s response. ‘Other florists would kill for that kind of exposure.’ Ava was convinced Lauren herself would probably be first in the queue, but still wondered if her fee for the work could ever make up for the body blow that seeing those pictures had provided. And then came the second punch: later that very same day Ava received an email from a woman in which she explained that she had been having a six-month affair with Mick, the darkly handsome but elusive and unreliable boyfriend with whom Ava had just spent the last three years of her life. Already living together, they had been saving to buy a property while making do in a tiny one-bedroom in East London, above a bone-shaking noisy main road. Devastated by the way her dreams of urbane adulthood had panned out, Ava decided to leave London for a year and spend some time in the area where she had grown up in, trying to decide her next move. Initially concerned months spent within ‘popping by for a quick cup of tea’ distance of both her parents and Lauren would leave her suffering a nasty dose of claustrophobia, Ava soon realised the opposite had happened. Now she breathed a deep sigh of relief at being away from the capital’s eternal hamster wheel of marriage-career-babies, even if those possibilities still preoccupied her mother. Slowly, the pain of soured romance faded, as did the stress of working for her dictatorial former boss, Nigel, Bespoke Florist to the Stars. Of course she missed some of her friends and occasionally daydreamed about walks along the river or shopping in department stores with proper cosmetics departments but largely, she realised, she was not a Londoner.

When that first year of working at the charming little garden centre in the grounds of a local stately home ended, she knew she couldn’t go back to her old life. Instead, she chose to invest her savings in buying a small place in Salisbury and setting up a business of her own. If the ‘finding eternal love’ column on her life plan was to take a little longer than planned, she was damned if she would waste time on the ‘enjoy your work, and be the very best at it’ column. Thus, Dunne’s of Salisbury, her pride and joy, was born and quickly became a fixture in the market town. Ava soon found she was far more quickly integrated into the local community than she had ever been in London, where the idea of borrowing a cup of sugar always remained a faintly ridiculous fantasy. So what if life was quieter, less glamorous and or dramatic in Salisbury? It was the path she had chosen and what would make her happy. Just like Robin, with whom she had now been for five years. Lovely dependable Rob – he would never let her down, of that she was sure.

Ava’s two cups of tea had hit the spot by the time she followed Matt outside with the large wooden A-board. It had ‘Dunne’s’ written across the top of it, in the classic typeface she had chosen five years ago and still loved as much today. The bottom half was blackboard, upon which Ava leant forward to write ‘Peonies – 6 for £5’, and beneath that ‘Rosemary – £6’ in her wide loopy font. After brushing the white chalk off her fingertips, she stood back to check her handwriting and then admired the pavement display.

‘Looking lovely,’ she told Matt, who was just tweaking some of the last bunches to make sure none were squashed too tightly together. Ava stooped and rubbed a stem of young, oily rosemary between her fingers. She held one hand to her nose and inhaled the fresh scent of clothes and roast dinners.

‘As are you, boss,’ replied Matt, with a cheeky wink. He held the door open for her and as it closed behind them both, she turned the ‘closed’ shop sign over. As the beeps of the 9 o’clock news began on the radio, Ava rested one hand against the sign hanging on her glass door. Open. Smiling to herself, she headed back to her desk.

She hadn’t even reached it before the bell on the door tinkled, announcing the first customer of the day. But it wasn’t immediately clear who it was for they appeared to be entering backwards. It took a moment and a commanding ‘EDMUND!’ before Ava realised that it was a woman reversing a double buggy into the shop. Readying herself for the potential chaos, she brushed a stray hair away from her face. Matt immediately left the worktop of foliage he had been separating and went to help the customer. As she swung the buggy round, a ruddy-cheeked toddler leant out of his seat towards the brightly coloured strands hanging from reels of twine fixed to the wall. He was wearing a pair of bright blue trousers and a rugby shirt that would have fitted one of Ava’s childhood teddies. His hair was soft, with a hint of a curl, and his dimpled cheeks and knuckles gave the impression that he was made entirely from uncooked pastry dough. His sister was asleep in the other seat, wearing a huge overcoat. Her legs, in a pair of bright pink tights with patent leather shoes on the end, were limp; her head was thrown back and she was drooling.

Their mother had the kind of haughty glamour only gained by living in the countryside in a house so big you don’t always know who is in it. Almost impossibly thin for someone with such young children, she had long dark, slightly wavy hair, falling around a face that was horsey and beautiful in equal measure. She too was wearing a rugby shirt, only hers was clearly a women’s cut – deep pink, with a pale pink collar. On her feet were flat Converse All-Star Plimsolls but even so, she was as tall as Matt. Entranced by the twine, little Edmund clambered out of his seat and toddled off, causing the entire buggy to lurch forward. Dangling from the handles were an enormous Mulberry handbag and several carrier bags of groceries from the wildly over-priced delicatessen across the square, their weight clearly greater than that of the sleeping youngster now jolted from her sleep. All three adults leapt to support the buggy as organic baby food and Dorset Knobs tumbled. The child woke with a start, looked around her and then settled back down again once the buggy was secured.

‘Hiiiiii,’ the woman said, lifting her chin. ‘I need some flowers.’ Ava wondered why else she might have come in, but smiled patiently. Meanwhile, Matt busied himself back at the worktop.

‘Great,’ said Ava, brushing her hands on her jeans in readiness. ‘What are you after?’

‘Dinner party, this weekend, but I’ll need them delivered – there just isn’t going to be time.’

‘That’s fine, we do local deliveries.’

The woman seemed neither surprised nor grateful, apparently used to living in a world where she knew she would get her own way, on account of knowing she could afford to.

‘Super. Well, we need a couple of large arrangements for the table …’

‘The dinner table?’

‘Yah. Like, centrepieces.’

From the corner of one eye Ava spotted the reels of twine spinning wildly as Edmund turned round and round, wrapping himself in coloured strands. She tried not to wince. What good would that do?

‘Okay.’

‘And then, I want, like, something romantic. Something that looks as if, like …’ the woman paused, a flash of uncertainty crossing her face for the first time.

‘Yes?’ Ava continued to concentrate on focusing on the customer, not her son. ‘Well, something that will seem …’ Gazing heavenwards, she held her hands out in front of her, thinking. It was impossible for Ava not to notice her stunning engagement ring. A huge diamond, surrounded entirely by several other tiny diamonds, it was breathtakingly beautiful. Ava imagined her husband choosing it for her. Someone, somewhere, adored this woman enough to pick out a fabulous piece like that for her. To him, she was adorable, not formidable or brittle as she seemed today.

‘What I’m after is something that will look as if my husband has bought it for me. Like I said, I need something romantic.’

Ava blinked, momentarily baffled by such a curious statement. Was the woman buying something that she wanted her guests to believe she had had bought for her? The way that she was now avoiding her gaze suggested this was exactly what she was doing. For a second, the awkwardness hung in the air between them. Then, just as suddenly, the tension left. Ava thought no more of it – if she were to spent her life trying to second-guess people’s reasons for buying flowers, she would be quite mad by now.

‘Edmund, do stop that!’ the woman said with resignation, leaning to take her child’s chubby hand. Squealing, he ran across the shop, where he hid behind Matt’s legs. ‘Darling, behave!’

After rummaging around in her handbag for a scrap of paper and a pen, the woman glanced up at Ava. Leaning on the back of an expensive-looking navy blue wallet, she wrote a name and number.

‘Super. It’s very charming in here so I’m sure you’ll do something appropriate. Why don’t you call the house later and talk to Mary about delivery and sorting out payment.’ She half-handed, half-threw the piece of paper to Ava, while grabbing her son and attempting to strap him wriggling into his buggy seat.

‘No problem,’ said Ava. ‘So, two dining table centrepieces and something romantic, and I’ll speak to – Mary, was it?’

‘Yah, Mary.’

Once again the woman avoided eye contact and then, at twice the speed they had arrived, the family were gone.

As the door closed behind them, Matt looked up with a smile.

‘Told you,’ he said.

‘Told me what?’

‘Roses on a Monday – they never go anywhere happy.’

‘Oh, you are such a cynic!’

But deep down, Ava felt a prickle of uneasiness as she wondered what was going on in the woman’s life. Seemingly she had it all, yet she was bristling with tension.

‘Just you wait, we’ll have a romantic in before long!’ she added lightly, causing Matt to roll his eyes at her.

She walked over to the twine and started rolling.

As Ava returned to her heap of Monday morning paperwork, Matt put together some of the arrangements that they created for local businesses, occasionally stopping to take payment from some passing trade. Ava noticed that he was selecting some elegant lilies and arranging them with some of the greenery he had prepared earlier. It was for Ruston’s then – the hairdresser on the corner of the high street. Ava was very fond of Sarah the manageress there and the two would sometimes go for a glass of wine after work to discuss business (and end up talking about anything but).

She still felt slightly unsettled by the brittle woman who had been in earlier. Though she had been treated far worse in the past, especially in London while working for Nigel, there was something about the pure invisibility that the woman had caused her to feel: she was so sure of her place in life, so glossy and confident. Ava imagined how sophisticated her dinner party that weekend would be, and imagined her husband thanking her for it afterwards, before they headed upstairs. Someone like Ava was of no interest at all to this woman – there was barely any respect there at all, and certainly no admiration.

Ava made a start on the invoicing, while making sure that her suppliers in Holland and London, as well as locally were paid, and checking that she had invoiced her clients in the nearby hotels, restaurants and private homes. These were the jobs that brought her financial security, but it was the passing trade that interested her most. She enjoyed feeling like an agent for romance, helping men to make that special gesture, or creating bouquets to celebrate births and weddings. So often it was up to her to sprinkle the magic on a situation, or to encourage communication at moments of extreme emotion for those who otherwise said little of importance to each other. She pushed Matt’s conviction that a percentage of her flowers were merely props for cheating hearts to the back of her mind. Yes, she was an agent for romance not an aide to the unfaithful.

The filing complete, she shuffled through the junk mail that had gathered over the weekend. Pizza delivery, cheap cable TV deals and local taxi companies … She shoved it all into the recycling bins beneath her feet, thinking of the weekend she had bought the bins with Rob, shortly before the shop opened. They had still been friends then, yet to turn their relationship into a romantic one. Not that they were a particularly romantic couple these days. After all, a courtship spent hunting for recycling bins would never lead to too many sparks flying. But Ava loved Rob – kind and consistent, he might be attractive in a catalogue kind of a way but he was everything Mick hadn’t been. She looked down at the recycling bins again and saw that in with the pizza leaflets was a flyer for the local arts centre. Sarah had mentioned it the last time they met – she was thinking of taking some classes.

‘You all right down there?’ asked Matt.

‘Yeah, yeah,’ she replied, absentmindedly. ‘What time would you like to take lunch?’

‘Ooh, I don’t mind, whenever suits. Soon?’

‘No problem, and while I remember – I don’t have to get to the supermarket tonight as Rob’s said he’ll cook at mine, so I can lock up.’

‘You’re kidding? That would be great – I offered to give Amy another driving lesson tonight.’

Ava forced herself not to flinch at the mention of Matt’s airily optimistic plans to teach his girlfriend to drive.

‘Yeah, it’s fine. Honestly.’

‘Great stuff, we’re both happy! Amy gets her lesson and you get a romantic dinner for two.’

Ava smiled at the memory of Rob promising to make her favourite pasta dish tonight. She had been very proud of the roast she put on yesterday, but hadn’t expected him to make such a sweet gesture in return. Cooking wasn’t a strong point for him, so she knew the offer was heartfelt and was secretly a little smug about it. Romance didn’t have to be all champagne and roses. An image of herself pointing in a mirror and mouthing ‘You’ve still got it, gal’ floated through her mind. Obviously there was the mild anxiety about what he might do to her kitchen, left unattended, but she had chosen to overlook this and focus on the loveliness of a meal cooked for her.

‘Look at you – all flushed with excitement!’

‘Oh, behave,’ she muttered, blushing at having been caught out in her daydream. ‘Go for your lunch now then, or I might change my mind about tonight.’

Within minutes of Matt heading out to get his sandwich there was a sudden lunchtime flurry: a cheerful woman of a certain age who spent 10 minutes looking at each of the bunches of Dutch tulips to check she had chosen the best, a retired gentleman after a bay tree for his garden, an unnervingly over-familiar woman who seemed to relish telling Ava exactly how much she knew about each and every one of the bunches on offer and a brisk, housewifely type who seemed furious that daffodils were no longer in season and out on the pavement for a pound a bunch. Ava did her best to keep everyone happy, while leaning back once or twice to take the odd phone call. Just as she said goodbye to the final customer, she heard the shop door go again. She turned around, mildly frustrated that a Monday lunchtime had turned so chaotic, and saw the back of a man’s head already bent over the lowest row of flowers.

‘Hi there, can I help?’ Fake it till you make it, she told herself. He’ll be gone in a minute.

‘Yes, please – I’d like some roses, please. The most gorgeous you’ve got …’

Smiling, he turned to face her. His eyes naturally turned down on the outer corners, lending them an air of gentle sadness despite his broad smile. Dark brown, the irises melting into the pupils, they were hard to look away from. He was wearing a cornflower blue shirt – un-ironed, but expensive-looking – and navy blue trousers; he also had on a smart pair of brown brogues, well worn but good quality. Ava walked towards him, one hand held to her lips in thought. Once she was standing next to him she realised even over the scent of the flowers in the shop he smelled of a combination of leather, expensive soap and perhaps a hint of vetiver. She took a deep breath.

‘Well, we have some wonderful ones in today,’ she began, pointing at the red roses Matt had been discussing earlier.

‘No, red’s a little … Well, it’s a little Argentine Tango for me.’

Ava blinked. She knew exactly what he meant. For an inexplicable reason she suddenly imagined herself, her fair hair mysteriously dark, tied back in an elaborate, glistening bun. She was wearing a dress the same deep red as the roses, split to the thigh. In between her rouged lips was one of the roses.

‘What else do you have?’ he asked, staring at her curiously.

‘What else do I have?’ Ava nodded seriously, playing for time. Wake up woman, you’re serving a customer!

‘Well, we have all sorts.’

‘What would you recommend?’

‘Me ? Well …’

‘Yes, you don’t look like you really do tacky bouquets …’

‘Thank you.’ Blushing. Again.

‘So why don’t you put together something you’d like to receive.’

‘Me ?’

‘Well, I don’t know what I’m doing and clearly you do, so why don’t you choose something you think someone like you would love to receive.’

The thought of this man bringing her flowers made Ava bite her lip very hard.

‘But it’s my job – no one brings me flowers. Bit of a busman’s holiday, I suppose.’

‘Oh, come on! Surely someone presents you with a bouquet from time to time?’

‘Not really.’ She was blushing again, remembering the delicate and awkward conversation that she had once had with Rob, where he firmly explained that he could never buy her flowers as she would always know better than him what she liked – and get a better price. Suddenly being an agent for the romance of others seemed less enchanting.

‘In that case I’m going to have to rely on your imagination.’

All Ava wanted was for her imagination to slow down a little …

‘Okay, what’s your budget?’

‘Ooh, £40?’

‘I’d choose something less formal than roses – perhaps more rural, local flowers?’

‘That sounds perfect.’

‘Softer …’ Ava’s eyes seemed to have locked with his again.

‘Perfect.’

She smiled, then began making up the bouquet. The man stood against the wall opposite her and watched as she plucked a selection of gentle late season tulips and sweet peas, some of the gorgeous cabbage roses that had arrived earlier in the day, then various foliage and tied them together with plain, straw coloured twine. Both were silent during this process, Ava doing her best to concentrate on her task, all the while conscious of his gaze on her hands and the back of her neck. He seemed comfortable in the quiet, unlike a lot of her customers who so often wanted to talk about the weather, the latest celebrity gossip or how business was going. When she was finished, Ava lifted up the bouquet to show him.

‘It really is perfect, I can’t thank you enough.’

‘It was nothing – I’m so glad you like it.’ She glanced at him again, then quickly dropped her gaze to the floor, suddenly shy. The man took two £20 notes from his wallet and passed them to her. She put them in the till before presenting him with the flowers.

‘I do hope you receive the bouquet you deserve soon,’ he told her.

‘Honestly, I’m more of a chocolates girl,’ she replied, suddenly tiring of his constant gaze on her, flustered by his assumptions about her life. ‘I am surrounded by flowers all day.’

‘It’s not so much the flowers as the gesture, though, is it?’

He was at the door now and turned as he said this, before winking and heading outside.

Smug, thought Ava. She wondered what sort of man goes to buy romantic flowers and can’t help but flirt with the florist? As for the assumptions he had made about her lack of romance … Charmless. She reminded herself of her romantic Monday-night dinner as she swiped the trimmings from his flowers into the bin: Flowers aren’t the only way to express yourself. As she slammed the bin lid shut, the image of herself dressed for the Argentine Tango once again flashed before her.

Chapter Two

Later – Monday, 22 August

On the dot of 5.30 Ava waved goodbye to a cheery Matt and indulged in some Olympic-level pottering once he’d gone. She gave the easy option – simply locking up thoroughly – a swerve, instead indulging in a little time in her shop. Polishing the brass handle and plaque on the door as if it was a fancy hotel, twisting the coloured twine neatly on its reels and all the while enjoying the silence of a closed Dunne’s the Florist. She made sure all of the paperwork for the next day was in order, closed her laptop properly instead of just hitting ‘sleep’ and slamming the lid, then gave the mugs by the kettle a little tidy. Sure, a women’s magazine would have advised heading home early for a luxuriant, candle surrounded bath, but this level of A-Grade faffing about relaxed Ava and she loved every minute of it. Once more she watered the cornflowers, the tall, lonely-looking bay trees and the herbs now inside on the shop floor. She picked up one of the rosemary plants and inhaled the refreshing scent again, before popping it in her canvas bag to take home. Yesterday’s roast, cooked with rosemary from the same delivery, had been such a success that she decided to take another pot home and plant it. First, a nice terracotta pot on the windowsill to keep an eye on, and then in the garden in the spring, for future roasts. After a day filled with hassle and hustle, anything seemed possible in this stillness.

She felt a sudden surge of affection for Dunne’s. It was her safe place, one created by her, for her. A place where she had made her dreams and those of others come true. The haughty woman from that morning seemed a distant memory, an irrelevance. Ava was happy to have left it to Matt to call her housekeeper, the elusive Mary, and she was right to do so for he had charmed her in no time at all and the order had been smoothly made. The majority of the red roses had been bought by an exhausted and exhilarated new father who turned up towards the end of the day, who clearly hadn’t slept since Saturday night and was covered in a thin sheen of nervous sweat. He stared manically at Ava, while explaining in at least 40 words per sentence more than he needed that he had driven in from the hospital on the recommendation of one of the nurses as his older brother once told him that garage or hospital flowers would be a mistake he’d come to regret for the rest of his life. Ava listened calmly, letting his manic stream of too much information wash over her while Matt smirked to himself in the background. Twenty long-stemmed deep red roses … Exquisite, they had been the high point of her day apart from the doe-eyed flirt, who she hurriedly pushed further to the back of her mind.

Before she put on her coat, Ava texted Rob to tell him that she was now on her way home and to ask if she could pick anything up en route. She knew he’d probably be back by now and would have let himself in. Maybe he’d even got to work on her meal. As partner in a small local web agency, his work was largely portable, which meant that he usually finished work very promptly. When she first met him, she had recoiled at the mention of him working for a web agency, imagining soul-sapping London-based companies named ‘Obtuse’ or ‘Slap Tha Truth’. But Rob’s agency was considerably less cutting edge: named after himself and his business partner Laurence, it was simply Collins & Cook – creators of websites for local businesses, data companies and a couple of regional artists and authors. The whole thing sounded mind-numbingly dull to Ava, but as he had pointed out to her when they were still friends: ‘It’s how I make my money, not who I am.’ To be fair, he had gone on to win her over in that first year of friendship with trips to the local playhouse, the cinema or museums. He liked to read, he enjoyed similar TV shows (within reason) and he was also enthusiastic about discussing all of this, as well as her growing business.

Rob’s punctuality was a real bonus when it meant long romantic evenings in together while his portable, self-employed ways seemed a modern, cutting-edge way to live but it was less enticing when he started tinkering around with his phone late at night, checking up on things in the second half of a film, suddenly jabbing at the touch screen in a frenzy. In fact, it pushed Ava to the very limits of her patience and reminded her of how glad she was to have a shop whose well-polished brass plated door she could firmly shut at the end of the working day. She smiled to herself as she locked up, feeling a small, almost smug glow about heading home to such dependability and love, before crossing the market square towards her car.

Ava walked past the cinema, the butchers and her favourite shoe shop, pausing to admire a pair of strappy sandals that she was hoping to find the excuse to buy any time soon. After crossing the cathedral square just as the bells were briefly pealing, she walked beside the river, whose banks were delicately lovely in the hazy evening light. She stopped to buy a bottle of crisp white wine at an off licence not far from the river and as the shop owner handed it to her, she could feel the condensation from the fridge chilling the paper he had wrapped it in. She pictured herself peeling off the paper, pouring two glasses and handing one to Rob at the hob. Maybe she could persuade him to give her one of his shoulder massages, too. She was almost hugging herself with contentment by the time she reached her car and began the 10-minute drive to her little house. The roads were clear and she was home in no time, pleased to see that the roses she had spent years encouraging around the front door were now as English and elegant as she had always hoped. Now the sun was dipping over the horizon and Ava could hear a cuckoo in the distance as she reached for her handbag and the wine from the passenger seat, then shut and locked the car door. She peered into the front window – her sitting room was neat, untouched since last night.

On turning her key in the front door Ava gave it a shove, but it was slow opening, edged on a heap of post beneath the letter box. For the second time that day she picked up an uninspiring clump of bills, direct mail and flyers. She dumped it on the hall table, with the wine and started to take her coat off.

‘Hellooo! I’m home!’

Silence. She paused. The house was clearly empty. After hanging her coat on one of the pegs above the table, she walked through the hallway to the kitchen at the back of the house. The evening light made the room look so pretty, but it was unavoidably empty. There was a used mug on the wooden surface next to the sink. It was the same one that Ava had left on Rob’s bedside before heading to work that morning. Next to it was a half-full milk bottle, gently warming in the sun’s rays. And in the sink itself was a used cereal bowl containing the dregs of some old, once-damp muesli, slowly cementing itself to the edges. Ava turned and went back to the hallway, where she placed a hand in her coat pocket to retrieve her mobile phone. She glanced at the screen: nothing. Following this, she placed it on the hall table next to the wine, which was now in a small puddle of condensation, its tissue paper sodden. She picked up the bottle and put it in the fridge. As she did so, she heard the buzz of a text on her phone and went back to look at it.

‘Sorry darling forgot I had squash with Laurence. Promise dinner tomorrow? At mine?’

Ava glared at the screen, as if she might develop special powers – the ability to rearrange the letters into something a little less rage inducing, perhaps. Stepping into the sitting room, she hurled the phone and then herself on to the soft leather sofa. She slumped, staring into space, with nowhere to vent her frustration. In seconds her evening had transformed from the kind of perfection that justified her every adult choice to an anxiety-inducing pity-party for one. How could he be so casual about it? Why had he only thought to tell her now? Surely they were already at the courts? So why hadn’t he suggested coming over afterwards? Why did he care about none of this, and how was it that she suddenly felt so desperately flat?

She took her shoes off, rubbed her feet and then rubbed her shoulders. All alone, an evening in … Maybe she was the woman no one bought flowers for, after all.

The phone buzzed. Ava wriggled a hand back down behind the cushions and glanced at it again. An apology? Not a chance.

‘Hey hey you. Can we talk later? Major dress stress coming up. Can. Not. Deal.’

Ava winced a second time. It was not Rob, but Lauren. Ugh, an enticing suggestion for what would inevitably be a half-hour conversation about wedding dresses! What a way to finish the day. More ambitious, tougher-skinned and more inclined to relish a confrontation than her sibling, Lauren often seemed to play the older sister role, despite being five years younger. Relishing every life stage, she sailed through them, competence oozing from every pore. Her career as a property finder for Wiltshire’s finest appeared to go from strength to strength, she had a gorgeous and supportive fiancé in Rory and she was also a rigorous athlete, regularly competing in local and regional triathlons. Lauren seemed intimidated by nothing, prepared to take on anything and with the ability to create drama and excitement, wherever and whenever she felt like it. Invigorating as she was infuriating, she had thrown herself into wedding plans with the enthusiasm of a woman accustomed to succeeding.

‘Just got in. Give me 5 mins’ typed Ava, keen to buy herself enough time to open that wine and pour herself a large glass. She’d need fortifying for this particular chat.

To be held at the same stately home in whose adjacent garden centre Ava had been employed when she first returned to Wiltshire, Lauren’s wedding was to be one of Wiltshire’s finest: a full country-house extravaganza, complete with the dress of her dreams. Only trouble was, Lauren’s dream dress wasn’t quite coming into line with her dreams. Where her pragmatism and straightforwardness usually served her well, it now meant she was struggling to explain her ‘vision’ to the dressmaker she had chosen. Tensions were rising. Somehow, Ava had found herself Designated Listener.

Shoulders slumped, she wandered into the kitchen barefoot, casting a dismissive glance at the cereal bowl in the sink on her way to the fridge. She swung open the door, looking for inspiration – or at least a snack. There was a lump of old Parmesan, nearly at the rind, some watery ham in its supermarket packet, the top now curling, and three eggs. Omelette it is, she thought to herself. In the shelf on the fridge door was half a lemon, turning green at the edges: the remnant of a long-forgotten gin and tonic. Next to it was the wine, which Ava opened and tipped liberally into her glass, cherishing the glug that only comes from the first pour. She took a sip and returned to the sofa, where her phone was already ringing.

‘Hi there!’

Momentarily confused, she paused. That wasn’t Lauren’s voice. She glanced at her phone to check: it was Mel.

‘Oh hi there! Sorry about that – I thought you were Lauren for a minute. She was about to ring and now you’ve saved me. Anyway, boring! How are you?’ Ava took another big sip, relaxing into the idea of a good gossip with an old friend.

‘Marcie, NO! Sorry, Ave, just a minute …’ There was a pause. Mel was one of the legion of Ava’s friends from college who was currently knee-deep in homework, scribbled-on walls and bruises from accidents sustained by slipping on Lego. She had two small children: two-year-old Marcie and six-year-old Jake. Ava waited, half-listening to Mel as she reprimanded her youngest, who was at the stage where experimenting with paint while wearing a highly flammable-looking pink princess dress were life’s greatest joys. She was mindful never to judge Marcie, though. After all, she spent several hours a week daydreaming about the infinite romance of owning a proper ballroom dancing gown – one with a train, sparkling diamante straps and a skirt that swished with every movement. She realised she would much prefer to talk to Marcie about her dresses than to Lauren about hers.

‘Sorry, honey, I’m back,’ Ava’s reverie ended. ‘I was just calling for a catch up really, no big gossip. I know it’s easier to email, but I fancied a chat. Jake’s making a cake for the first time and I’m not allowed in the kitchen for another 40 minutes, apparently.’

‘Awwwww, sucks to be you!’ teased Ava. ‘But, um, is he by himself?’

‘Ha, yeah! I’ve just left him to it – Rich is upstairs on the Xbox.’

Their relationship, based on ridiculous teasing, had remained largely unchanged since college, which was exactly how Ava liked it.

‘Oh great, sounds wonderful – make sure he cleans up the knife drawer afterwards,’ she replied.

‘I’ve got Marcie on it now. For Mummy, it’s Wine Time.’

‘Tell me about it. What a day!’

Ava pictured Mel at home on her bright pink sofa. She knew she’d be wearing jeans, her Birkenstocks and a hoodie in an eye-wateringly bright colour, probably orange. Her dark hair, of which Ava had been so envious when they were flatmates in London, would be scraped back – the brief period of trying to blow dry it for work long over. Mel had always been scruffy in a sexy kind of way, so the mayhem of motherhood suited her. She was rarely any messier than before, but she was certainly not going to let impending middle age prevent her from dressing how she wanted. Nor was Ava, but whenever they spoke it crossed her mind that it was somehow more impressive that Mel was pulling off motherhood with such verve, especially as she still worked part time.

‘You okay, hon?’ began Mel.

‘Yeah, fine really,’ she muttered before beginning to explain Rob’s last-minute change of plan but she didn’t get very far without almost being able to hear Mel’s hackles rising all the way from London. She could sense her bristling at the mention of him failing to meet her exacting standards for what Ava’s boyfriend should be.

‘What a charming way to behave!’ observed Mel, dryly.

‘Yeah, it’s not ideal. Fridge scraps for me tonight. You’re the one with the kids, I’m the one with the lover and yet you’re at home with your feet up while I’m the one foraging for dinner. This is not what the lady mags tell me our roles are supposed to be.’

‘This turn of events is far from usual for either of us, at least you can console yourself with that.’

Certainly it was rare for Mel to sound so relaxed at this time in the evening, but Ava realised with a shiver that this wasn’t exactly the first time that Rob had flaked out on plans lately.

‘Yes, I suppose so.’ Ava bit her lip, thinking.

‘It is, isn’t it?’ Mel pounced on that small pause.

‘Yeah, yeah! Let’s put it this way, it’s certainly not something I’m used to or intend to put up with.’

‘Good! Getting used to it would be the worst of all.’

As the words were still leaving Mel’s mouth, Ava felt something unfurl within her: the realisation of her acceptance. She was getting used to this.

‘Anyway, let’s park Rob for a minute,’ Mel continued. ‘I’ve got a plan – and I want you to hear it.’

‘Oooh, go on!’

‘I’m going to apply for tickets to Strictly Come Dancing this year. We are going to do this …’

‘Oh wow, that’s given me the Summer Strictly Feeling.’

‘Eh?’

‘Sorry – it was Lauren who coined that term, not you. You know what I mean, though – end of the summer, nights are drawing in, you’re wondering if the diamante sandals you bought for summer are ever going to get used again this year but secretly, deep inside, you’re thirsting for Saturday nights curled up in front of the telly with a stew, instead of marinating chicken breasts in peri-peri sauce and chopping up endless feta for salads.’

‘Oh I HEAR you! I am dreading the day I have to accept that the kids will be back playing inside all day instead of using the garden but still … winter jumpers, new long boots and Strictly?’

‘Exactly ! It’s so bittersweet. On the one hand, dark evenings coming up; on the other, dark evenings of Salsa and Waltzes.’

‘Oh goodness, you’ve got me all excited about it now. So – tickets?’

‘YES! I want to do this. How come we never thought of this before?’

‘You know how it is – new babies, new businesses, you leaving London and deserting me.’

‘I suppose. What made you think of it?’

‘Emma – she’s started taking Salsa classes.’

Ava snorted with laughter. Emma was a particularly pushy mum who lived on Mel’s street – albeit the ‘smarter’ side, as she was always quick to remind her. She had two children the same age as Jake and Marcie, and felt very strongly that Mel would be quite unable to cope without her peerless and never-ending stream of advice. It was always delivered in a stage whisper, with a dead-eyed smile, while Emma’s children slept angelically in their expensive double buggy and Mel’s threw their shoes – and socks – into the hedge. From breast feeding to violent video games and even as far as how to ‘keep the spark alive’ between herself and Rich, Emma’s advice was a constant source of both fury and hilarity to Mel and Ava.

‘Wow! Emma. At Salsa classes.’

‘I know.’

‘That, I simply cannot imagine. Where is she doing it?’

‘Same place as I do Pilates!’

‘How do you know?’

‘She took me aside to tell me in her special whisper – some things never change. I was in the supermarket car park, trying to get everything in the boot and she came over and announced it, as is her way.’

‘Well I never!’

‘I know, I thought I was about to be given a lecture on how spending too much time on Angry Birds had a 72% chance of Jake being a crack addict by the age of 13, but no – she wanted to talk Salsa.’

‘So what did she actually say?’

‘She decided it was going to be a good way to keep fit during the winter, when the outdoor tennis courts are closed. Remember, she gets bored terribly easily because of her fierce intellect, so the gym – or running around after her children like a normal person – just isn’t enough stimulation for her. She says the instructor is very respectful and he’s called Damiano. And you know what?’

‘What ? She’s run off with him?’

‘No ! It was the first time she has ever not bragged. She wasn’t telling me in a “Now you must do this because guess what, I’ve just raised the bar in the being-as-good-as-me stakes”, she just seemed to be enthusing about it. I was braced for the “fierce intellect” nonsense, but this time she managed to keep it all in. She says she now has a different relationship with her body – she feels more free!’

‘I don’t know what to say. I want to take the mickey but it sounds kind of sweet.’ ‘Yes, it was. For the first time, she seemed … happy.’

‘Wonders will never cease.’

‘And that, my friend, is why we must make sure we sort ourselves out with tickets this year. I’ve got the link to the website, and I’m poised like a cat, ready to pounce into action to apply. My children will be playing with knives behind my back as I sit there clicking “refresh”. Can’t wait! Apparently they allocate for the whole series in one go and we just have to wait and see which show we get tickets for. So exciting!’

‘That would be great. Not the knives bit, please – I love those kids. But imagine if we got them. I could get Matt to look after the shop for me and make a proper weekend of it – leave Rob to his squash games, and come and see you and the kids for a while.’

‘I’d love that, it’s been too long to be left with only Emma for company.’

‘It would be wonderful, cheer me right up.’

Ava didn’t realise what she was saying until she had said it. But suddenly, what had been unfurling in her was spreading its tentacles. Loneliness, unhappiness or was it simply a case of the grass always being greener?

‘Do you really need cheering up? I’m worried about you.’

‘Oh, I’ll be fine. I’m just, well … a little bit flat.’

‘Because of Rob?’

‘No. Well, yes – but not just Rob, just a creeping sense of …’

‘MUUUUM!’ Mel’s son Jake was screaming from the kitchen, alarmingly loudly even via Ava’s phone.

‘Is everything okay?’

‘Oh, God! I think Wine Time is already over … It’s not fair to leave Rich to deal with this alone.’

Sounds from the kitchen were ominous. Was that a plate breaking? ‘No problem, you get back to them.’

‘But we’ll pick this up in an hour or so when I’ve dealt with this lot.’

‘Sure,’ Ava tried to give an audible but reassuring shrug but it didn’t work very well. ‘You take care and love to the lot of them.’

Ava pottered back to her kitchen with an empty glass, refilled it and then made what she could of the Parmesan, ham and eggs. She snipped a few needles from the rosemary plant she had left by the door, telling herself calmly that there was no need to let standards slip just because she was unexpectedly alone. After all, it wasn’t as if she lived with Rob yet. That was a whole separate discussion.

She sprinkled the rosemary onto the omelette, gave it a final turn, put it on one of her favourite plates and then sat with it at her kitchen table, listening to next door’s cat squawking at a blackbird. Soon she saw the bird flap up over the wall and fly away, clearly flustered. She remembered Mel’s obsession with feeding the birds in their shared flat at college: she had spent hours staring out the window at birds on the adjacent garage roof pecking away at the stale bread and bird balls she had thrown there for them. It was possibly the most unglamorous and most endearing thing any of her college friends ever did. But the two were firm buddies long before the bird-obsession revealed itself. They met at swing classes in their first year and warily spent time together, each fearful the other was what they considered to be a ‘part timer’ where their love of dance was concerned. Back in the early nineties being a dance fan had seemed almost subversive and certainly not a regular hobby for 19-year-olds, so their commitment was unusual.

‘Ava, as in Ava Gardner?’ had been Mel’s first words on being introduced to her.

‘Yes,’ she replied hesitantly. Usually people turned their noses up at such a deliberately retro name, or thought she was assuming a mannered alias.

‘Wow! Named after The Barefoot Contessa. Impressive … I think my parents had been watching too many Melanie Martin dramas when I was born.’

And then the dancing began. Ever confident, Mel had paid Ava little attention for the next few weeks as she was furiously pursuing a boy whose name neither of them could remember any more. But after a few months of regular attendance at Swing Night and some pretty raucous parties, they formed a close friendship. By the end of the year they were flatmates. Despite the inherent skankiness of their student accommodation, dancing proved an irremovable streak of glamour and romance in an otherwise average student experience and despite house moves, babies and their impending forties, it remained the glue that bonded them. Mel’s unstoppable pragmatism needed a friend with Ava’s ability to let her imagination fly. And Ava’s over-imaginative tendency for anxiety was grounded by the reassuring sense Mel was always able to provide.

The unfamiliar trill of the landline jump-started Ava from her memories.

‘Hello?’

‘Hi, how are you?’

Lauren’s sugary, super-kind tone was the one used when she was keen to get the polite practicalities out of the way as quickly and emphatically as possible before launching into a chat that was to involve her getting her own way. It worked like a dream in the property finding business when she was schmoozing with City players for whom she was commissioned to find idyllic boltholes in which to install their docile wives, movie location scouts who needed country homes that didn’t require the guttering to be digitally removed, or privacy conscious celebrities who wanted a driveway slightly longer than the longest of lenses. But it was too much of an old trick for Ava, who was able to read the signals loud and clear. In fairness, it wasn’t always Lauren’s tone – Ava did her fair share of whinging too, but tonight this was the last thing she felt like. She poured a further slug of wine into her glass.

‘I’m fine, sweetie, just a bit down but it’ll pass.’

‘Oh, right.’

Ava noticed that Lauren didn’t ask why she was feeling down – a classic move. ‘Rob messed me around over dinner.’ she continued, regardless.

‘Were you supposed to go out?’

‘No, but …’

‘Oh, right.’

Another slice of classic Lauren: in her opinion, if it wasn’t a smart restaurant in Marlborough or a genteel gastropub with portraits of hunting dogs on the walls, it can’t have been a big deal.

‘You sound really disappointed, though.’

‘I am. It’s no big deal, though.’ Her tone softened as Lauren showed genuine concern.

‘But you’re okay, you two?’

‘Yeah, I think so.’

Now a pause when Ava would have liked Lauren to ask a little more.

‘Great. So listen, about this dress …’

And that was that.

‘Yes?’

‘There are big problems with organising this dress fitting. The woman is being totally unreasonable about timings and when I can actually get to see her. She doesn’t seem to understand that I’m not at a desk all day like normal people.’

Ava wondered what was so bad about being at a desk all day, and if Lauren had ever noticed she wasn’t either.

‘She is saying she won’t cut the fabric without my approval but the times she’s giving me are really restrictive. I can’t just drive all over Wiltshire on a whim because it suits her – I am the customer after all! Honestly, I knew I should have had it done in London, one of those lovely ateliers.’

‘Why didn’t you?’

‘This woman,’ Lauren seemed to spit the word, ‘is some kind of well-kept secret. One of the guys working on Bishopstone Park told me about her – she had worked on the costumes and did the dress for Violet Bennett.’

Violet Bennett, breakout star of the country-house drama Bishopstone Park, had indeed worn a glorious dress for her well-documented wedding to the romantic hero of a gritty urban crime series. Elegant, befitting of a leading lady, but avoiding the trap of trying to look like a princess, it had been praised by the weekly magazines and the designer had been the subject of much debate but a name never released. Sadly, if the tabloids were to be believed, the marriage itself was not enjoying quite the same level of success as the gown itself.

‘If she did that dress or any of the other dresses on the show maybe she can call the shots, Lauren. She’s clearly a pro – she can probably pick and choose her clients.’

A moment’s silence.

‘Look, the long and the short of it is if we don’t want the whole thing to turn into a total ’mare, I’m going to have to take a half day off work – rearranging a really important client meeting – and I’d like you to come with me.’

Ava, apparently, had no essential meetings with clients.

‘Right, when is this?’

‘Just under two weeks: Saturday, 3 September.’

‘And you’d like me there?’

‘Yes, of course – I think it would be less tense if you were there and we could discuss your bridesmaid’s dress.’

Ava watched the blackbird circling the garden again, and prayed for a quick, sudden death. She swallowed another sip of wine. Being an adult bridesmaid had long been such a source of complete terror to Ava that she and Lauren had been joking about since long before she even met Rory. It was time to face the music.

‘My what …?’

‘My bridesmaid! Don’t say it like that – it’ll be fun. I’m not going to put you in a weird prom dress, you’ll be in a Viv creation just like me and we can choose it together.’

‘I’ll put the 3rd in the diary, but I want you to know that I hate you.’

‘I know you love me, sis. Honestly, if I’d known getting married was this much stress there’s absolutely no way on earth that I would have decided to do it.’

‘That couldn’t be less true. It simply could not be less true! For that ring, sis, you would have agreed to do whatever Rory asked you to do.’

‘Oh God, you’re so right!’

‘And you bloody love him …’

‘I do!’ And she did. Rory was a godsend, to the point where Ava and her mum had started to refer to him as the ‘Lauren Whisperer’. Indeed, the rest of the family was no longer able to imagine living without him. He was gentle and had eternal patience with Lauren’s more diva-ish demands, but secretly Ava suspected her sister not only really loved him but still found him wildly sexy and would do more than she was ever going to let on to keep him happy. There was also the engagement ring, which had almost blinded Ava the first time she saw it. Rory, a man who spent all day working with his hands and had been too shy to speak to Lauren’s family for the first six months they had been dating, had surpassed all expectation when he surprised Lauren with it. A woman who always maintained she would like a say in any jewellery bought for her discovered in an instant that sometimes not being in control could have its pleasures. And that instant was when she opened the small, dark green velvet box containing a 1920s Art-Deco ring: an antique-cut solitaire surrounded by three baguette cut diamonds on each side. It took her just under a second to say yes. She was as stunned with joy at being asked as she was by the heart-stopping fact that Rory had bought the piece at auction, paid for the history to be written up and presented an elegantly framed version of it to her. Lauren liked to pretend her car – a terrifyingly fast Audi TT – was her favourite possession but she wasn’t fooling anyone.

After hanging up, Ava washed up the few things in the sink. Before doing so, she carefully removed the small diamond that Rob had bought her to celebrate the one-year anniversary of Dunne’s. At the time it had seemed such a romantic gesture, so respectful of her work and her pride in the shop, but now it was hard not to see it as a friendship ring, a holding pattern to postpone any more serious discussion. Resentfully, she chipped away at the muesli around the edge of Rob’s cereal bowl, wondering if they should have a relationship more like her sister and Rory. Trying to impose such a thing would never work, but still, it already seemed as if she and Rob had been married forever and now they might never make it down the aisle. Was this the worst of both worlds, she wondered while drying up her plate and replacing it in the cupboard.

Enough, this moping must stop, she then told herself. A successful independent woman in a contented relationship should not be spending her evenings comparing diamond sizes with a sister she loves dearly. That way, madness lies. She headed upstairs, had a quick shower and set up Swing Time on her laptop to watch in bed. After half an hour, the Fred and Ginger Waltzes and the heavenly frocks lulled her into a dreamy sense of calm. Just as she turned off and turned over, her phone buzzed.

‘Sorry again about tonight, hope you had a good evening. Will make it up to you tomorrow or even better, Sunday, I promise. I won the squash!’

The thought was sweet, but Rob had clearly forgotten they were going to her parents for lunch on Sunday. As she turned over and curled up, she told herself firmly that it didn’t matter, that the absence of kisses on his text weren’t a sign. She replayed the Waltzes in her head until sleep finally came.

Chapter Three

Sunday, 28 August

‘Sunday drivers!’ spat Rob, slamming on the brakes of his somewhat battered Polo as an elderly couple in a dark green Rover pulled out in front of them with no warning. Ava winced, lurching forward and feeling the seatbelt cut into her chest across her necklace. Meanwhile, Wogan chatted chummily on the car stereo. Ava had barely slept, her nerves were jangling and there was a small well of nausea in the pit of her stomach. At this stage it could have been nerves, Rob’s driving or that extra Scotch she had had before bed last night causing it. Either way, she just wanted to close her eyes and block everything out. Instead, she turned to Rob, whose face was now puce with rage. A tiny bead of sweat trickled down from his hairline to the front of his ear. His hair seemed thinner than she had realised before, volume masking the areas of scalp that were beginning to peek through.

‘Easy!’ she said, hands pressed onto the dashboard. She looked back at the elderly couple’s heads bobbing away as they chatted away to each other, oblivious to their part in the drama playing out behind them.

‘We’re running late. You know how your parents are about us being late. We can slow down, if you like and then we’ll arrive with 10 minutes of wise-ass comments about how we’re never on time. Your choice!’ muttered Rob, raising a sanctimonious eyebrow.

‘I really do think they would prefer us late than dead …’

‘Oh, so I’m trying to kill you now? My apologies! I thought I was doing my best to employ my driving skills to get you to your parents’ in time. My mistake!’

‘Come on, I know you’re only doing your best. Relax!’

‘It’s hard to relax, knowing Lauren and Rory will have been sitting there for half an hour already when we arrive, late as usual, turning up like bad pennies.’

‘No one minds, they’ll be pleased to see us. Dad will make some stupid dig and then we’ll all forget about it. Jeez, why are you getting in such a state about it?’

‘You’ll all forget about it – I won’t! And you know why I’m getting into a so-called “state” about it.’

‘Don’t try and pin this mood on me, that just isn’t fair!’

‘Well, there’s a marked absence of anyone else to …’

‘To what, to blame this on? Hmm … I’ll tell you what, how about you? How about you take responsibility for this weird, petty fixation you have about my parents not liking you because it’s all in your own head! It’s simply something you invented and none of us know why.’

The track playing on the radio ended and Wogan piped up again, jolly as ever. His tone was so completely at odds with the mood in the car that Ava almost started to giggle in desperation. Instead she turned her head and gazed out of the window at the fields now whizzing by. She was exhausted at having this fight with Rob again. A couple of years ago, not long after Rory really became one of the family, Rob had convinced himself that Ava’s parents did not like him, that they somehow thought he wasn’t good enough for their daughter. It was simply not true and based on nothing beyond what seemed like an elephantine chip growing on his shoulder. He had clearly cherished his role as ‘the good boyfriend’ prior to Rory’s arrival more than any of them realised. Having known him for so long, Jackie and Andrew were thrilled when their daughter had ‘finally’ fallen for him. During those early years of Dunne’s Ava felt as if she and Rob were some kind of dream couple – blessed to see the potential in each other. Now, five years on, the cracks in their relationship were deepening but what really stuck in Ava’s mind was that neither of her parents loved Rob any less than they ever had.

‘You know, things have changed,’ said Rob.

‘Yes, I do. But what changed was you, not them. All they ever wanted was for me to be with someone who loves me, which you do, so that’s fine.’

But this statement was met with further silence and no confirmation of the fact that he loved her. Welcome to stability, thought Ava, it looks a lot like being taken for granted. Meanwhile, Rob stared ahead, tensing his jaw. Ava watched the muscle on the side of his face flex and relax, and thought of the nights she had lain awake recently, hearing him grind his teeth. What has happened to us and how can we undo it? A tractor turned out in front of them, followed by a small rush of cars coming down the lane from church. Ava saw Rob’s hands grip the steering wheel even more tightly. Clenching and letting go … Clenching and letting go.

Of course the glass of Scotch she had had last night was nothing to do with why Ava felt so sick and in her heart she knew it. She had tried to look forward to the weekend, surrounding herself in a cloud of positively all week, but the nervous knots she could feel just tightened as doubt and anxiety unfurled themselves. She had tried to pretend to herself that she had had a stressful week at work, but she knew that wasn’t true. Matt had worked so hard and with such a sunny attitude that she was actually thinking about giving him a bit of time off to enjoy the last of the summer on his surfboard. He was charming to the female customers and mates with the men who needed a hand in choosing flowers for their loved ones. In so doing he had definitely affected the shop’s turnover and been a pleasure to work with.

Only a couple of days ago she had enjoyed a drink with Sarah from Ruston’s the hairdresser and their fruitful exchange of local gossip had been as much fun as ever. Ava was sure that other shops and businesses did it too, but she and Sarah always laughed at the way the locals assumed they were all so anonymous – especially some of the fancier wives from the smart villages outside Salisbury. Little did they know their shopkeepers were taking an interest in their lives, noticing their children growing older, their hair getting longer (or greyer); their cars bigger. It was as if a whole local soap opera was running, kept alive by gossip between the shops around the market square, and Ava adored being a part of it. There had been great pleasure in the discovery that one of her clients was ordering flowers to be delivered to herself at work, even going so far as to pen romantic cards to make her colleagues jealous. That joy was even greater when Sarah revealed she had attended school with the same woman, who had a terrible reputation for stealing other peoples’ boyfriends.

No, it hadn’t been a bad week at work at all – it was life at home that was behind this sinking feeling. Rob had not taken well to being reminded about the long-planned Sunday lunch and had been making sly little comments about it since Tuesday. The resentments bubbled over this morning, leaving them silent in the car, all the while simmering and unable to find a way out.

It was not how Ava had ever imagined that Sunday mornings with her true love would be. During two long years after she had broken up with Mick–just as all of her closest friends were falling in love, getting engaged or married – she had fantasised about the Sunday mornings they were all having. She would wake with a start, wondering how to fill the next three or four hours until it was acceptable to call someone and not be interrupting anything, while her imagination cruelly filled in the time by picturing her friends in exaggerated romantic scenes. She never went quite so far as the cliché of the single long-stemmed red rose in a slim glass vase on a tray, but there had been bleak weekends when similar images presented themselves and taunted her. The Romantics – wildly in love, sharing the newspapers in bed, their side tables holding smug little cafetières of heavenly-smelling coffee and dainty fruit salads comprised of carefully sliced berries that they would feed to each other between kisses. Whether or not these scenes had ever taken place was neither here nor there to Ava. Now she could grudgingly admit that when she first got together with Rob there had been very a little of that for he wasn’t really one of life’s natural relaxers. Enjoying a moment was ‘wasting time’ and holding hands in the street only meant ‘shoving it in people’s faces’. By the time they crossed the divide into romance, they had known each other for so long that those early Sunday mornings together had not proved as much of a discovery as they usually were with a new boyfriend. So little heat, so little intrigue. It wasn’t that Ava hadn’t loved him – in fact, she had been relieved when there turned out to be so little left to discover – thank goodness for none of the nasty surprises she had been dreading! But that stage seemed so far away, as if it had faded with time. If he was so reluctant to show her he loved her at all these days, what did that say?

It’s just a phase , she had told herself that morning, all relationships go through bad patches. So for the first time in months Ava had gone against her natural instinct and actually tried to be proactive about things. Convinced a bit of a spice was what would rock the status quo, she decided to channel Lauren’s effervescent confidence. Rob had been sitting up in bed reading the motoring section of the paper when she rolled over and kissed him, nuzzling right up against him, pushing her head through the crook of his arm. He had smiled, given a little sniff of a laugh and kissed her on the top of her head … then batted her away as if she were a naughty toddler. In that moment it was as if a piece of her had been rubbed away, as if there was slightly less of her.

‘Oh, come on! What’s motoring got that I haven’t?’

‘It doesn’t want to talk to me about the future – and it doesn’t have morning breath either,’ he told her coldly.

Ava withdrew at once and perched on the edge of the bed, increasingly vulnerable in her pajamas.

‘I see,’ she said quietly. ‘Thanks for that.’

He had smirked and muttered that it wasn’t personal.

What had been the loneliest time of the week when she was single turned out to be even lonelier now she was part of a couple. Shaking with despair, she pulled on a pair of tracksuit bottoms and an old T-shirt then went for an hour-long run through the crisp country lanes. As she closed the front door behind her at midday, Rob was there, showered, hair combed, tidying up the kitchen. He smelled of soap and self-righteousness, and greeted her with a tight smile – a masterpiece in passive aggression.

‘You know we need to leave in 15 minutes if we’re to have a hope of getting there for 1pm, don’t you?’

‘Yes, yes, I do! I’m just going to have a shower now,’ she replied, flustered.

‘Well, be quick – we wouldn’t want to be late …’ and when she headed up the stairs, ‘Hope you’ve got all that pent-up energy out now.’ As she turned into the bedroom, Ava could still hear Rob chuckling to himself.

The rest of the journey passed in silence but for the reassuring mutterings of Wogan, which Ava tried laughing at once or twice to make the point she was merely concentrating on the radio and not ignoring Rob. Finally they pulled into her parents’ driveway, just 10 minutes later than planned. As Rob’s car crunched on the gravel, Andrew stepped out of the kitchen door to greet them. He was wearing a pair of slacks and a classic ‘Dad’ jumper. There must be a thousand men like that up and down the country, thought Ava, and there isn’t a golf course in England that won’t have someone wearing that jumper somewhere on the premises. She waved back at her father and wound down the window on her side.

‘Hi, Dad!’

‘Hello, darling,’ he said, as he walked to her door and opened it for her.

‘How are you? Business good?’

‘Yes, thank you, and how are you?’ She hugged him tightly as he helped her with her bag, then she reached into the back of the car to collect the pudding she had brought with her.

‘Everything seems under control here – the courgettes are coming along well. Your mother is thrilled!’

He turned to Rob, who was pointing his keys at the car to set the alarm. ‘Hello Rob, old chap, good to see you – and on time for once!’ At this, he let out a great belly laugh and Rob smiled the smile of a man heading into court.

‘I’m fine, thank you, Andrew. And yes, we are on time – although if we’d driven at Ava’s speed of choice I think we’d still be somewhere on the A303 right now!’

She shot him a glance. Not right now, please can we just get through lunch? Rob avoided her gaze.

All three headed into the kitchen, with Andrew holding the door wide for Ava and Rob to make an entrance. Ava was holding a large pavlova overflowing with the last of the summer fruit. She had painstakingly assembled it the night before and was relieved to see it had somehow survived Rob’s driving, safe in the special container her mother had given her for Christmas. Though sagging a little, possibly in sympathy with its creator, it was more than passable. Rob looked almost bride-like, carrying a huge bunch of perfect creamy white calla lilies. He strutted into the room and presented them to Jackie with a flourish as if he had taken the time to organise them himself; that Ava had gone out of her way to get in a few extra of her mother’s favourite flowers on the Saturday order seemed of little consequence.

Jackie was standing at the hob, stirring the gravy. She was wearing a ridiculous saucy apron that Rory had given her that Christmas. Beneath the Venus de Milo emblazoned across her torso she had on a pair of black velvet trousers and a bright patterned knit. It was the sort of garment described as a ‘crazy hotchpotch weekend sweater’ in the catalogue – exactly the kind of thing that made Ava feel quite murderous, but Jackie considered it a ‘hoot’. Her ash-blonde hair was perfectly blow-dried and she was wearing a chunky necklace of randomly sized glass beads twisted together. As ever, her lipstick was perfectly applied – she was, after all, a woman who had named her daughters after Hollywood goddesses.

‘Jackie,’ said Rob, kissing her lightly on the cheek. ‘It’s a joy to see you!’

Going with a charm offensive, thought Ava. Sly move.

‘Rob, how are you?’ Jackie’s face broke into a crinkly-nosed smile as she stretched up to return his kiss. ‘Have you had a dreadful drive?’

‘Not at all,’ he told her. ‘It’s been a glorious morning.’

He’d stolen the march on her and Ava was seething.

‘Sit down and let me get you a drink. Gin and tonic?’

Jackie waved to the large wooden kitchen table on the other side of the room, where Lauren and Rory were already sitting, surrounded by newspapers. Rory was clearly wearing cashmere and was working his way through the same motoring section that Rob had enjoyed earlier that morning. Lauren was reading the style pages, effortlessly glamorous in a floral dress that Ava remembered having seen in a boutique a couple of months ago. She hadn’t even taken it off the rack as it had looked so odd on the hanger, but now it was perfectly obvious that this was a heavenly 1950s tea dress. Rory looked up and smiled as Lauren got up to greet them.

Ava gently placed the pavlova on the kitchen worktop and gave her mother a huge hug.

‘Ava, darling,’ said Jackie, holding her arms out to her. ‘Words fail! You look exhausted. Have you been getting enough protein? You girls work all hours and I don’t think you eat properly. Protein’s what you need. I read about it online – Penny sent me a link on the Facebook.’

‘I’m fine, thank you, Mum,’ Ava told her firmly. ‘And it’s Facebook, not the Facebook.’

‘Yeah, and when did you get a Facebook account, Mum?’ asked Lauren over her shoulder as she hugged her sister. ‘And what are you doing with it?’

‘They started organising so many of my clubs via the Facebook, I was getting rather left out,’ Jackie explained, while Andrew stood behind her at the kitchen worktop with two glasses full of ice, into which he was hurling large slugs of gin. ‘And it turns out it’s wonderful! I’ve hjoined a group for fans of Bishopstone Park, where we can chat about that scandalous gamekeeper business. There’s a woman on there who claims to have seen the scripts in a back of a taxi and she says she know how it’s all going to end. I can barely cope! You girls should get more involved. I’ve checked it out and there’s all sorts of chit-chat about Strictly – different pages about the dancers and the kinds of dance – it would be heaven for you, heaven! And as if that’s not enough, I’ve already seen photos of Penny’s baby granddaughter in Australia – she’s just two days old!’

She was almost puce with excitement.

‘That’s wonderful …’

‘But seriously, Jackie, it’s called Facebook, not the Facebook,’ interrupted Rob.

‘It doesn’t matter, it’s sweet,’ said Ava, putting an arm around him, eager to keep the peace.

‘It’s interesting,’ said Rory, who had now looked up from the motoring section. ‘Because it really was called the Facebook to begin with – it only got changed later. So maybe Jackie’s the most cutting-edge of us all.’

At this, Jackie shrieked with laughter and clapped her hands together.

‘Cutting-edge? Marvellous!’ laughed Andrew.

Clearly Rob didn’t think this comment was at all marvellous as Ava could tell when she felt him stiffen with indignation beneath her touch.

It didn’t take long for the conversation to turn to local gossip. Ava and Lauren, who had grown up in the village, were always keen for an update: who was having a ridiculous argument with whom, how the local farmers had done with the year’s crops and what the latest dramas from the village pub were. There was no shortage of news from Jackie, who had a heart of gold but the eyes of a hawk. No petty grudge went undocumented, no late night shenanigans was unnoticed and thanks to Dave, her favourite barman from the King’s Arms, no drunken indiscretions went unmissed. As it turned out, one of the big local farmers had not only been cheating on his wife but he’d been doing it with the lithe daughter of one of his friends. Just 22, she was fresh out of university and still hanging around at home, with her floppy blonde hair and cardigan sleeves pulled down over her knuckles. Her parents seemed to have been hoping she would simply fall in love with a passing Wiltshire landowner and they might be able to have their house back to themselves. Apparently not!

‘It’s the oldest story of them all,’ declared Jackie. ‘Men are all the same – I don’t know why anyone would get married.’ She chuckled at her own wisdom, seemingly unaware of her audience.

‘Erm, Mum,’ said Ava. ‘We are all still here, you know – your husband and your engaged daughter. And her fiancé.’

‘Well, I didn’t mean us,’ said Jackie with an airy wave. ‘I just meant, you know, generally.’

It was exactly this kind of theatrical generalisation that most irritated Rob. Ava watched his jaw clench and braced herself for his analysis later.

Meanwhile, Lauren and Rory chuckled at Jackie’s ludicrous statement and started teasing her about whether she thought they ought to be getting married.

‘Ooh, that reminds me, Ava! I really want to talk to you about flowers before you go.’

‘Oh girls, you must! Flowers are so important at weddings.’

‘Thanks for that, Mum,’ said Lauren, rolling her eyes at her sister. ‘More much-needed advice for Ava, who as we all know really struggles with her floral know-how.’

‘You lot are so mean, I just want to pass on the wisdom of my great age.’

‘Yeah, you’re ancient,’ Lauren prodded her shoulder, ‘practically a crone.’

While they were teasing each other, Ava was wondering exactly what it was Lauren wanted to say about the flowers for her wedding. Would it be advice on getting a good florist, or was she about to ask her to do them herself? Ava was slightly dreading being asked as she knew it would be a fresh new level of stress, but then she didn’t want to be deemed not up to the job, or too ‘difficult’ either. She was about to ask, but the conversation had meanwhile galloped on to an analysis of how much better this summer’s village fête had been organised. Unsurprisingly, Andrew had some quite firm ideas, while Jackie had the inside track on who had fallen out with whom by the end of the day.

The meal itself proved as delicious as the gossip. Lauren had brought homemade pâté, which she proudly served on Jackie’s favourite Melba toasts before everyone tucked into an amazing piece of roast pork. The crackling was perfect, the gravy sublime and the roast potatoes crisp, comforting nuggets of heaven. Jackie beamed with pride to see them all enjoying it and seemed to puff up like a proud hen as she offered seconds around the table. Ava watched Rob load a second helping onto his plate. He took a mouthful, wiped a trickle of gravy from around his mouth, and then carried on chewing his meat, completely focused on his meal. She tried to imagine how he would look and behave once he was the same age as her dad, who was sitting there with his twinkly-eyed grin and booming laugh. Would she still know Rob when he was that age? Perhaps they’d be sitting like this with their own children one day? Was this where they were heading? It seemed impossible to imagine, but then Ava remembered those years when she had found it unfathomable that they would ever be boyfriend and girlfriend.

Halfway through the meal, relaxed and with the soothing food inside her, Ava felt overwhelmed by tiredness and decided to offer to drive home. She put a hand over her wine glass when Andrew offered her a second glass and whispered over to Rob, ‘You go ahead, I don’t mind driving back – I really don’t fancy drinking.’ At this, he eyed her with suspicion. Ava spotted this and felt as if someone had pinched her heart between finger and thumb. ‘Honestly,’ she told him, ‘just enjoy yourself.’ This wasn’t met with a smile, however, just a shrug and then ‘Fine.’

Ava got up to serve the pavlova. Everyone ooh-ed and ah-ed as she brought it to the table, and Jackie and Andrew seized the opportunity to give them all a rundown of how the various fruits in their little garden were coming along. The courgettes had been the stars of the season, the basil almost out of control during the heat of the summer, but the darling fig tree had let no one down either. Ava concentrated on dividing the meringue into equal portions, preventing the fruit from falling too far down the sides of each slice and letting the chatter wash over her. She was at the exact point where sad and relaxed meet, a resigned melancholy. It was as if the room were in soft focus as she passed a plate to each of them, sat back and enjoyed her pudding, half-listening to a conversation Jackie and Lauren were having about how to keep their jewellery clean. So intent were they on maintaining sparkle without causing damage, it was as if they were in some sort of Bling Club.

‘That ammonia diamond cleaning stuff absolutely stinks, doesn’t it?’ said Lauren.

‘Oh I know, it’s ghastly! Sometimes I have to put my eternity ring in the shed if I’m cooking,’ agreed Jackie. ‘I just can’t bear the smell of it in the house. But then one day I became incredibly nervous that a squirrel or a magpie or some other creature would find its way in there and either help itself to my diamonds or drink the stuff and die.’

‘So what do you do now?’

‘I make your father clean it when I’m at bridge.’

Andrew raised his eyes heavenwards and nodded.

‘It’s like a horrible window into my future,’ said Rory, with the kind of childlike smile that made it perfectly obvious that he loved all conversations about his finest hour: the engagement ring. As the table chuckled collectively, Ava glanced idly at what she called her ‘Dunne’s ring’, with its simple band and small stone. She felt her father’s broad hand pat her leg beneath the table before he leant in and whispered in her ear, ‘Your day will come, my darling. I have no doubt.’ At this, she stared down at her plate, ashamed to be once again comparing herself to Lauren, for whom she was genuinely happy. She felt the tears well up and blinked fast to do her best to quell them: she didn’t care about a wedding or even want a big ring, just a slice of the joy that Lauren and Rory seemed to share – the sense of being in the same boat together was what she envied, not the accompanying accessories.

As Ava looked up, she noticed Rob was staring at her curiously. For the first time all weekend she was completely unable to read what his face was saying. This in turn panicked her, not because she couldn’t tell, but because once she found it so easy to do so. She smiled at him and he smiled back, but each looked as if they had just told the other bad news. Tiredness turned to sadness as she stirred milk into her coffee.

The drive home was even more silent than the one there. Rob reached for the radio controls as soon as the car was out of the driveway and they had stopped waving to Jackie and Andrew. Once he found a books show on Radio 4, they listened to it intently for the entire journey, occasionally commenting companionably. The programme provided a conversational buoy that they clung to gratefully. Anything rather than drown in the mire of the things they suddenly needed to talk about. There was none of the resentment of earlier in the day, it was almost as if their situation was something they shared. At last they had found common ground again. Maybe now they could turn a corner.

Ava pulled up outside the house and turned the engine off.

‘Would you like me to come in?’ asked Rob.

He always stayed over on a Sunday night. They might never have chosen ‘their song’, but there had never been any doubt that Sunday night was ‘their night’. The fact that he even had to ask this question made feel Ava sad. Meanwhile, the sensation of cold, prickly anxiety running through her was increasing.

‘Of course, it’s Sunday.’ She smiled up at him. ‘I’m still really full, though. Not sure about cooking.’

‘Okay, no problem.’ He smiled back, politely.

Their new-found awkwardness continued as they reached the front door, each trying to hold it open for the other: the timidity of a first date, with none of the delicious tension. When they finally entered, both were tired and took their coats off with relief.

Ava went into the kitchen to put the container from the pavlova into the dishwasher and saw that it had not been emptied from last night’s curry. She scanned the room; it quickly became obvious that the ostentatious tidying up that Rob had been doing when she had returned from her run had been somewhat superficial. As she noticed this, she heard the insistent mosquito buzz of racing cars in the living room. Clearly Rob had decided to pop his feet up and catch up on Formula 1. Ava took a deep breath. She didn’t want to be that woman – the one who whinged on about the housework, only pausing to nag about commitment. That woman was everything she dreaded, becoming her was to be avoided at all costs.

She took a deep breath and went upstairs, where she lay down on the bed for a couple of hours, trying to read a book. It was soon replaced by the remainder of the morning’s papers, which she flicked through looking for something to distract her. Eventually she gave up and had a bath. By the time she came back downstairs in her pajamas and fluffy dressing gown they had been at opposite ends of her admittedly tiny house for almost three hours.

‘I’m going to make an omelette,’ she said, standing at the living-room door. ‘Would you like one?’

Rob looked up, displaying all the signs of having forgotten that she was in the house at all.

‘Ooh, yes please! And look – Morgan & Hughes is on.’

The regional detective show was one of Ava’s favourites – second only to Strictly in the cosy autumn TV watching schedules. They had spent many happy evenings together, with trays of comforting wintery food on their laps, trying to work out who the unlikely murderer was. (It was always the most famous of the weekly guest stars!)

‘But it’s already begun.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘I’ve missed the set up.’

‘You’ll catch up …’ He patted the sofa next to him, as if she were a cat.

But you didn’t call me, she wanted to say. You used to call me! She chose not to say anything – it seemed wiser at this point.

Fifteen minutes later she was snuggled next to Rob on the sofa, their omelettes eaten and an apple shared. They watched the programme in the same companionable silence as they had driven back from the Dunnes, as if they were the best flatmates in the world. Later, Rob had a shower while Ava got into bed and returned to her book. He returned from the bathroom wearing pajama bottoms and an old T-shirt, got into bed, kissed Ava on the forehead and rolled over before she had a chance to kiss him back.

‘Good night,’ she mouthed to herself as she leant over to turn off the bedside light. She lay in the dark, staring at the ceiling and listening to the rise and fall of Rob’s breathing.

Just before she fell asleep she realised that Lauren had never explained what she wanted for her wedding flowers.

Chapter Four

Monday, 29 August

Monday. A fresh new day, except it didn’t really feel like it after a muggy, restless night’s sleep. Ava struggled through the morning as if she were wading in treacle. All of the usual tasks seemed to take twice as long; part of the Dutch flower delivery was wrong when it arrived so they were swimming in an extraordinary amount of tulips. A small child, momentarily unwatched, had silently pulled the petals off several hydrangeas within the first hour of Dunne’s being open. She felt stifled in her own shop, her safe place, of which she was usually so proud and felt so at home in. Today it felt too hot, too small for her – it was as if summer had suddenly decided make its final effort.

By eleven o’clock, Ava had dropped a tin pail filled with stale flowery water. She watched with resignation as it spilled out onto the shop floor and all over her feet. The plimsolls she had on seemed particularly inappropriate footwear as she felt the water seep in, knowing they would now stink for a day or two. She remembered standing in front of her wardrobe only a few hours earlier, too tired and defeated to wear anything more sophisticated than the jeans and stripy T-shirt she had opted for. Why bother, she remembered thinking, no one will notice what you’re wearing. Now she regretted not putting on her patent leather ballet pumps.

With her soggy feet and her sour attitude, Ava was less than a ray of sunshine for the customers. She was usually cheered to see Mrs Lambert, an adorable old lady who lived alone in one of the town’s smarter houses and often came by to cheer herself up with flowers. Though old enough that she walked with a stick and her voiced had softened with age, she was always smartly dressed with her hair in neat curls and her jewellery on display. Unfailingly polite and always interested in Ava herself, she was one of her favourite customers. But today she dithered a little, apparently as tired as Ava was. She changed her mind once or twice about what she wanted in her bouquet and Ava would usually make suggestions and tell her what was fresh in but today she was forced to bite her tongue to avoid snapping at the old lady and hurrying her along. Flustered by the change in tone, Mrs Lambert dropped her wallet on the shop floor and Ava realised with a jolt that her impatience was not unnoticed.

‘Oh, let me get it, Mrs L …’ she bent down on the shop floor, her younger hands scooping up the coins from the slate tiles at twice the speed of Mrs Lambert’s arthritic fingers.

‘Thank you, dear,’ she said quietly.

‘I’m so sorry, here we go.’ Ava put the coins into the wallet and handed it to Mrs Lambert. ‘Don’t worry about the rest. I feel I’ve been rude this morning and I’m so sorry – I barely slept in this heat and I can hardly think straight.’ She waved her hand away as Mrs Lambert tried to pass her the few remaining pound coins.

‘Really, dear, that’s very kind but I’m perfectly happy to pay full price.’

‘Of course, please accept my apologies.’

‘I was wondering if you were feeling alright – you’re usually such a happy soul.’

‘One of those days but I’m sorry you bore the brunt of it.’

‘Don’t you worry,’ said Mrs Lambert, taking her flowers and standing as tall as she could. As Ava held the shop door open for her, she turned and looked at her. ‘Just you remember your worth, dear. Don’t go letting anyone take you for granted.’

Ava stood in the doorway, looking out across the square as Mrs Lambert walked away. How did she know to say that? Was she starting to look like a woman who was taken for granted, one of those who settled out of fear of being left alone? Despite the heat she shivered at the thought, then noticed Matt making his way back from the bank, having deposited some cheques.

‘Hello you, all done!’ he announced, as he headed into the shop with her.

‘You feeling better?’

‘Yes, thanks – Mrs Lambert’s so sweet. She’s so dignified, isn’t she?’

‘She’s a class act, boss, no mistake.’

‘Isn’t she just! I could do worse than end up like her.’

‘I don’t think you have to worry about that just yet, do you? Anyway, what about old Rob-o?’

‘Hmm …’ Ava stared into space and Matt quickly looked away.

‘Listen, do you want to go early again if I take a bit of a longer lunch break?’ she continued. She was suddenly keen to take a walk and clear her head, to be outside for a while and feel the breeze by the river.

‘Sure thing! I’ll give Amy a text now and see if she’s up for another driving lesson.’

‘Great! How’s that going, by the way?’

‘She’ll get there.’

‘I see – it’s like that, is it?’

‘Yeah, but you know, patience …’ Truly, Matt seemed to have a boundless supply of it.

‘She’s a lucky girl, I hope she knows that.’

‘Aw, she’s a doll!’

Ava smiled and reached for the canvas bag under her desk. ‘Right then, see you later.’

‘Sure thing, boss.’

Ava walked out into the market square and took a deep breath, determined to turn this suffocating day around. She crossed the square and headed to the Marshall’s, the deli. The husband-and-wife team who ran it were about her age, but had two small children yet they still seemed to work all hours, run a great little business and be astonishingly chirpy to each and every one of their customers. She had a ruddy, rosy, classic English complexion and a sturdy, earthy kind of sexiness. He was of similarly generous proportions – clearly they were a couple that enjoyed consuming their produce as much as selling it. Ava doubted she had ever seen either of them not smiling, and she had caught him pinching her bottom more than once. There was something of a modern-day Ma and Pa Larkin about them.

‘Morning, Ava!’ boomed Jeff Marshall as she entered the deli. ‘Glorious day, gorgeous! How can we help?’

Ava selected some fresh pasta as a bit of a treat, knowing she wouldn’t feel like proper cooking when she got home in this heat, and asked for a box of eggs from the Marshall’s hens, as well as a bunch of enormous-leaved basil.

‘How’s business then?’ asked Sandy in her soft West Country burr, as she bustled up to the till with Ava’s goodies all wrapped in neat paper packages.

‘Not too bad, it’s been a lovely summer. You?’

‘Yeah, can’t complain. And that sister of yours has her wedding coming up?’

‘Not for a few months yet – it’s exciting, though. We’re off to meet the dressmaker in a few days.’

‘Cutting it a bit fine, aren’t you?’ asked Sandy with a small frown.

Ava gave a small wince. ‘Well, yes. But you know Lauren, nothing but the best for her. She has a fancy dressmaker doing her dress and mine – she works on telly stuff like Bishopstone Park and this is her last wedding dress slot of the year. We’re very lucky, apparently.”

‘Goodness! And what about you? Been waiting a while!’ Just as Sandy spoke, it seemed the rest of the lunchtime hubbub in the deli went quiet. For a moment even the air seemed a little more still. Why did people care so much? Just because Lauren was engaged, or did they think something was wrong with her because she’d been with Rob for five years without them so much as living together, let alone getting engaged? For a moment Ava longed for the anonymity of London. She blushed and ran a hand through her hair.

‘Oh, you know. No rush!’ Her voice, intended to be breezily casual, sounded shrill and insincere.

‘Right you are, then.’ Sandy seemed to realise that she had overstepped the mark and gave Ava a big wink as she handed over the goods.

Ava left the shop and headed for one of the benches on the riverbank, looking forward to sitting in the sun with her sandwich. So what was the Marshalls’ secret? Why did they always seem so delighted by one another? Their youngest was easily four, which meant they must have been together for at least as long as Ava and Rob. The chances were they had been a couple for significantly longer and yet they behaved like newly weds. Had they ever collapsed into a rut, or did they genuinely find each other deliciously gorgeous every single day? Were their standards lower, were they more realistic, or did they simply manage to put on a better show in front of their customers?

These unanswerable questions swum around Ava’s head as she sat by the river, sticking her feet out in the sun to dry off. What was making her feel so paralysed was the nothingness of the situation with Rob: he had committed no great crime, no unforgiveable acts of cruelty, but neither had he done anything to convince her that theirs was a romance worth sticking with. Were they going anywhere, or were they simply, irrevocably, in the doldrums? Time for action, she told herself. Something has to be done. She took another bite of her sandwich and watched a family of ducks eating some bread crusts thrown by a passing toddler and her exasperated-looking mother. As she wondered what to do, Ava’s phone buzzed in her handbag. She pulled it out and saw a text from Mel.

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Applied for Strictly tickets first thing – am beside myself with excitement. Cannot WAIT to hear! Am also convinced Emma is having an affair with Damiano, she’s like a different women. Polish your dance shoes, babe, we’re heading to Strictly. I know it! xxx

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Ava was thrilled when she saw the message. The idea of getting to see Strictly Live seemed impossibly glamorous compared to her current humdrum daily routine. Seeing the dances up close, and as for the dresses … it was impossibly exciting! She was halfway through a reply when her phone rang – it was Lauren from her car, clearly bored.

‘Hi, Sis!’ Ava could hear the crackle of the in-car speaker system. Lauren had a habit of calling when journeys were longer than 10 minutes, or if she found herself stuck in traffic. Ava found it endearing that it was conversation she turned to in those instances, not music.

‘Hello, you.’

‘I wanted to check that you were okay – you seemed a bit down yesterday. I couldn’t tell if you were just tired or what and I know we talked about the wedding for ages so I thought I’d check in and find out about you.’

‘Okay, I am a little down but nothing major. No specific thing has happened.’

‘But what’s up?’

Ava explained a little about Rob – the rut, the sense of nothingness. ‘I suppose we need to decide to move in one direction or the other,’ she concluded.

‘Why are you so “we” about everything?’ asked Lauren.

‘Ha! Hark at the woman getting married in a few months!’

‘It’s not that. It’s just … well, you don’t do enough for you. Do you know why Rory tries so hard to please me? Because I please me the most.’ Listening, Ava knew she was right. ‘You need to do something for yourself, stop making your happiness dependent on Rob.’

‘I know …’ began Ava.

‘I know you know! But sometimes you need someone to say it out loud. Don’t forget you’re a successful, creative, romantic woman. Rob’s lucky to be with you and maybe he needs to remember that, too. Has he stopped making an effort with you? I’ll kill him if he has!’

‘I suppose he has a bit, but now I find myself wondering if I …’

‘If you’ve stopped making the effort with you too? Stop making your life so much about him and pleasing him! Remember what you’re proud of in your life.’

‘Urgh, stop getting so motivational speaker on me! I just want my business to do well, to be kind to people, to get on with things without feeling as if I’m being a bit left behind by life – you know what I mean.’

‘Your business does do well, but the worst thing you can do is to start moping around in that shop. Who wants to buy romantic gifts from someone who looks as if she has a heavy heart? No one. No. One! You know what? At this point I think the kindest thing you can do, for you and for Rob, is to be good to yourself. Take a little of the pressure off. Do something you like doing – he clearly does, what with his squash matches and Formula 1.’

‘I suppose …’

‘Yeah, yeah, and if you want to win points for still being a good person you can do something nice for him too. Cook him a bloody pie or something! Jeez – relax, Sis!’

Sometimes standing in the full force of Lauren’s advice was a bit like standing under a power hose on a warm summer’s day – refreshing and exhausting in equal measure.

‘Okay, okay, you’re right. Thanks, doll. Well, you’ll be pleased to hear that Mel and I have applied for tickets to see Strictly Live. Can you imagine, we might get tickets and go up to the studio – the works! Anyway, how are you? Aren’t you supposed to be the stressed one?’

‘I’m fine and I really must talk to you about the flowers for my wedding, but I’m sitting outside of a property now so I can’t chat any longer. I do want to hear all about this Strictly business, though. It sounds amazing! Let’s have coffee before we go to see the dressmaker, shall we?’

‘Sounds great! We can hatch a plan for maximum efficiency.’

‘Oh, relax! We’ll just have coffee.’

‘Okay, okay!’

She could hear Lauren laughing as she said goodbye and hung up. For every inch that was terrifying about her sister’s personality, there were two of good-heartedness. Ava wriggled her toes, noticed her plimsolls seemed to have survived their dunking and headed back for the shop.

As soon as Ava was back behind her desk with a smile on her face, Matt popped out to get himself something to eat. Typically, the moment he left there was a sudden flurry of customers and then Ava had the shop to herself once more to do a little tidying up. She was standing inelegantly on a chair, trying to reach into one of the highest pails, when she heard the tinkle of the doorbell and looked down to find out who it was. The sun beaming through the shop front meant that she could only see a figure in silhouette, but she knew who it was in an instant. That curious combination of leather and vetiver drifted over the scent of the flowers again: it was the man from last week, the Argentine Tango man. As she stepped down from the chair, she brushed the hair from her face and for the second time that day wished that she had made more of an effort with her outfit. She swiftly dismissed that thought, however, remembering Lauren’s wise words that she should do more for herself, not other people.

‘Hello there,’ she said with a smile, brisk and professional.

‘Hi. Me again, I’m afraid.’

This time Ava noticed that he was not as young as she had thought him last time. He looked crisp and fresh, though, and carried himself with none of the defeated slouch that Rob had lately acquired but he was unmistakably her age, or maybe even slightly older. This time he was carrying a classic Harris Tweed overnight bag. An umbrella was lying across the top of it, along the zip between the two soft leather handles.

‘How can I help?’

‘I’d like something gorgeous again.’

Ava blushed and quickly looked away.

Stop it, she told herself.

‘Last time, you did a perfect job.’

Why did everything he say sound so outrageous? She must stop thinking like this.

‘Thank you,’ she mumbled. ‘You liked the cabbage roses, didn’t you?’

‘Yes, and those sweet peas are rather lovely too. Where are they from?’

‘They’re local, from a farm near Alvediston.’ Ava was proud to have been asked – and also relieved that for once the sweet peas had actually arrived when she’d been told they would.

‘It’s wonderful down there – I love that valley.’

He had taken a bunch of sweet peas from the pail and was now holding them up to glance at them against the light of the window. The petals looked translucent, almost glowing.

But Ava wasn’t looking at them.

He probably had a little more girth than he should beneath that bright blue shirt and while in profile she could see that his dark, slightly curly hair was greying a little at the sides, just the beginnings of salt and pepper. His hair was perhaps an inch longer than someone her dad’s age would have approved of and it certainly wasn’t a cut that Rob would have deemed businesslike, yet he carried it off. His clothes, especially his brown leather shoes, were pretty smart and his bag was clearly expensive. He had a lovely nose, and as he turned back to her she could see how dark his eyes were, almost black.

‘That’s where I grew up,’ said Ava – at exactly the same time as he asked, ‘Could you do me something with these, then?’

There was a confusion of apologies and gesticulation while each did their best to let the other be heard.

‘You …’

‘No, you …’

‘Go ahead …’ and eventually, ‘So, you grew up there? Me too – well, Bower Chalke.’

‘Really?’

Suddenly the shop felt extremely hot again. Why had she told him this? She took a fresh posy of sweet peas from the pail and started on the bouquet.

‘Yes, I used to go to ping-pong club in your village hall.’

‘So did I! Well, I did ballet – just after the ping-pongers.’

She looked away. Stop telling him this stuff …

‘Oh, those ballet girls! The 12-year-old me used to dream of catching a glimpse of them on our way out of ping-pong. Wow, I was a real dork! I’m sorry, you don’t need to know any of this.’ He laughed sheepishly. Was he embarrassed too? ‘It sounds like it!’ Ava laughed. ‘We ballet girls were not impressed by the ping-pong dorks! We thought we were the bee’s knees. In fact, I’m pretty sure I thought I was Ola Jordan at the very least. By the way, we could see you looking in the window at the end of our lessons – none of you were very subtle.’

‘Busted!’ As if wounded, he put a hand to his chest. ‘So cruel, the ballet girls! And it turns out even today they remain heartbreakers. That’s my childhood you’re trampling all over.’

Ava giggled again. For a moment she was unsure what the noise was before realising with sadness that she had become unaccustomed to the sound of her own happiness.

‘Suck it up, Dork – the ballet girls rule!’

Her exuberance was bubbling over, she had to catch herself and remember he was there for flowers. Now she set about making the bouquet, carefully selecting the stems, greenery and the twine. She put it together deliberately, concentrating on each movement, proud of her art. The man watched as she did so, silent as last time. There was no sulky tension here, though – he seemed perfectly comfortable without speaking, happy to watch her work without needing to comment on it or to make polite chit-chat. It was a sort of collaborative concentration. Ava remembered the silences that she and Rob had shared over the weekend, how they seemed so leaden, as if their words had been locked in an airtight room. This silence was very different: the longer it lasted, the more nervous she became about saying the wrong thing. All weekend she had been afraid the wrong words would appear too heavy and crush the mood, now she was afraid words would be too ephemeral, too unknowable, fizzing with uncertain electricity.

Whatever else, she mustn’t ask who the bouquet was for.

When he came to pay Ava, the man patted down his trousers and realised his wallet wasn’t in one of his pockets before bending down to search for it in his overnight bag. Ava made a point of looking away, not wanting to see a flash of his boxer shorts, or an intimidating scrap of some other woman’s silk negligee. Then she looked back immediately, eager to see exactly that. Her desire for clues as to who this mysterious – yet local – charmer was now consumed her. But she saw nothing, and he paid for the bouquet in cash. Denied a glimpse of either his name on a bankcard or the contents of his bag, she was none the wiser. Should she ask?

She picked up the bouquet, ready to hand it to him and by now convinced there might be an actual crackle if they touched.

This is a man with an overnight bag, who regularly buys flowers for someone else. Don’t ask, she told herself. Just don’t!

‘Thank you,’ he said, with a gracious sincerity that unnerved her more than the lighthearted flirting ever had. He took the flowers but there was no crackle. ‘They’re beautiful,’ he told her. He looked up, smiled at her and then left, quietly.

Ava watched him go, noticing how broad his shoulders were, really lovely and broad. Not in an ironic super-hero way, just capable looking.

She sat at her desk, staring ahead and strummed her fingers a couple of times. Something good, for me, she thought to herself. It had been so long since she had considered this that she really didn’t know what she wanted. She glanced down at her nails, stared around the shop again, uncomfortable with this moment of deliberate self-examination then looked for something else to do.

Anything. She reached for the pile of junk mail that had been below the door when she had opened up and idly flicked through it. Just like last week, there was a flyer for the local arts centre. She plucked it from the pile and turned it over, knowing she had thrown away an identical one last week. They were advertising dance classes: one week Latin, another ballroom, 12-week courses.

Uptight, judgmental Emma, who had made Mel’s life such a misery at times, crossed her mind. She remembered Mel’s exasperated reports after discussing Strictly with Emma at the school gates – always she had some arch comment about how she could do better than the celebrities, they just weren’t training hard enough. ‘Why can’t she just enjoy it like the rest of us?’ shrieked Mel one evening.

Always keen to impress some imagined external adjudicator, Emma had apparently bitten the bullet and was now by all accounts a model of relaxed womanly confidence, whether or not she was up to no good with her dance instructor! Ava remembered the fun she’d had with Mel over the years, so much of it on a dance floor. She thought of the times she had tried to dance with Rob at various weddings or Christmas dinners but he wasn’t at all interested, thought it faintly ridiculous. Ava realised that for as long as she’d been with him she had barely danced. This was it, this was what had to change: her ladder out of the rut.

She glanced at the website address running across the top of the flyer, above an image of a tanned man swirling a blonde, smiling woman round on his waist. Eagerly leaning in towards the screen, she typed it into her laptop. The website was very bright. Couples dipped and twirled across the page, while boxes with times and prices opened and flashed. More information than it was possible to absorb but she quickly realised that she would have to start as a beginner; the embarrassment of trying to keep up with lithe young dancers might be too much. Ava chewed her lip in a moment of hesitation – did she really want to do this? Of course she did! She imagined herself floating across the dance floor, supported on shoulders as wide and capable as those belong to the sweet pea man. Or dancing a Samba, out of her dreary jeans and T-shirt, wearing something short and bright, her skin glistening with tan and sweat, thighs like Beyoncé. She thought of the jaunty Strictly theme tune and how it brought a smile to her face even when she was entirely alone in the house.

These images alone were enough to cheer her up. She brought up the music selection on her laptop and changed the track in the shop to a CD of something Brazilian sounding – as close to Samba music as her personal collection could provide. Then she whacked up the volume, grabbed her wallet from her bag and started to fill in the details for the course. Grinning and jiggling her legs in time to the music, she bent over her desk, tapping away at the laptop. The door to a world of possibilities had just been thrown open, it seemed. I will force a large spoke of dance into my Wheel of Tedium, she chuckled to herself. She flicked the music another notch louder, fingers almost tapping the keyboard in time to the beat now.

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