FIONA LUCAS is an award-winning author of contemporary women’s fiction. She has written heart-warming love stories and feel-good women’s fiction as Fiona Harper for more than a decade. During her career, she’s won numerous awards, including a Romantic Novel Award in 2018, and chalked up a no.1 Kindle bestseller. Fiona lives in London with her husband and two daughters.

Writing as Fiona Harper:

The Memory Collector

The Other Us

The Summer We Danced

The Doris Day Vintage Film Club

The Little Shops of Hopes and Dreams

Make My Wish Come True

Kiss Me Under the Mistletoe

Copyright

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2020

Copyright © Fiona Lucas 2020

Fiona Lucas asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Ebook Edition © December 2020 ISBN: 9780008371920

Version 2020-12-07

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 Page numbers taken from the following print edition: ISBN 9780008371913

For Amanda, the best partner in crime

an author could wish for.

Contents

Cover

About the Author

Booklist

Title Page

Copyright

Note to Readers

Dedication

Part One

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Part Two

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Chapter Forty-Three

Chapter Forty-Four

Chapter Forty-Five

Chapter Forty-Six

Chapter Forty-Seven

Chapter Forty-Eight

Chapter Forty-Nine

Chapter Fifty

Chapter Fifty-One

Chapter Fifty-Two

Chapter Fifty-Three

Chapter Fifty-Four

Chapter Fifty-Five

Chapter Fifty-Six

Chapter Fifty-Seven

Chapter Fifty-Eight

Chapter Fifty-Nine

Chapter Sixty

Acknowledgements

About the Publisher

Part One

Chapter One

ANNA WAS LYING in bed with the duvet pulled up over her head. A thing not so unusual in itself, except for the fact it was half past seven on a Thursday evening, and she was fully dressed, bar her shoes. Somewhere in the distance, her doorbell was ringing. She was doing her best to ignore it.

She’d climbed into bed about half an hour ago, and she had no intention of getting out again that evening. Maybe not ever. It was nice in her cocoon. White. Calm. The world had been too bright today, too noisy. Just too flipping cheerful. But this was a lovely solution. She should have come up with it sooner.

The letterbox clattered. ‘Anna?’

Anna stared hard at the cotton duvet cover and began to count the individual threads above her nose. Maybe she should consider some sort of soundproofing?

The voice came again, louder. ‘Hey, there! I’m here. Open the door!’

Deep breathing… That was supposed to be good for keeping calm, wasn’t it? Anna decided to try it; she wanted so badly to hang on to this velvety, white numbness. The only problem was that it had been a very long time since Anna had been able to take a deep breath. Two years, nine months and eight days, to be exact.

Had it truly been that long? It still felt like yesterday.

She rolled over onto her side and curled into a ball, squeezing her eyes shut.

The voice called through the letterbox again, but it no longer sounded bright and happy. More irritated. Maybe even a little desperate. Anna blew out a shaky breath. Her bubble of calm was in a precarious state now. Cracks were appearing. She tried to pretend these intrusive noises were happening on a different plane, in a different reality. At least, she did until the voice became softer, more pleading.

‘Anna? Minha querida? Are you okay?’

Anna covered her face with her hands and let out a sound that was half-growl, half-sigh, then forced her legs out of her duck-down nest and found the floor with her feet. The rest of her followed a second later and then she walked mechanically out of her bedroom and down the stairs into the hall.

‘Thank goodness for that!’ her best friend said when Anna opened the front door. ‘I was worried you’d fallen down the stairs or slipped in the bath!’ Gabriela’s tone was cheery as she stepped into the hallway, but there was a tightness to the accompanying laughter and there were questions in her eyes. Anna knew Gabi wasn’t going to ask them, but she heard them anyway. You are okay, aren’t you? Or do I need to be properly worried?

Everyone Anna knew had questions in their eyes these days when they spoke to her. Often, the same questions. But they were afraid of saying the wrong thing. Or not saying the right thing. Anna lived in a minefield of eggshells.

Gabi thrust a cake tin into Anna’s hands. ‘I was missing my mother’s carrot cake, but I made far too much.’

‘Thank you,’ Anna said, receiving the tin and hugging it into herself. ‘I’ll look forward to it.’ Her friend’s bright-orange Brazilian version of the cake, slathered in chocolate sauce, was amazing.

Gabi’s eyes held a mixture of worry and hope. ‘Will you?’

This was more than cake. Gabi had always moaned that her curves were a result of her mother equating loving people with feeding them, but it seemed she was more like her mother than she realized.

Anna nodded awkwardly. ‘Of course.’ And then she went and placed the cake tin in the kitchen, out of sight, hoping it would curb any further discussion.

She appreciated that her friends and family cared about her, but she was sick of being watched, of every word that left her mouth, of every gesture, being judged and weighed and measured so they could compare notes, so they could encourage each other with the tiny pieces of evidence they collected that she was finally ‘getting over it’.

When Anna returned to the hall, Gabi squinted at her. ‘What have you done to your hair?’

Anna reached up and discovered that her shoulder-length brown hair was all fluffed up at the back. She smoothed it down with her hand, trying not to make it obvious. She didn’t dare glance in the mirror by the front door. She hadn’t left the house since Christmas Day, and she feared she’d see someone scruffy and pasty-looking. In comparison, Gabi looked immaculate. Her hair fell in dark, silky spirals around her shoulders and the cobalt-blue dress she wore complemented her warmer skin tone perfectly.

‘You are ready for the party, aren’t you?’ Gabi’s gaze travelled downwards to the crumpled little black dress Anna was wearing and to her stockinged feet. ‘It’s only a few hours until we will all shout “Happy New Year” and I don’t want to be late!’

Happy New Year…

Oh, how Anna would like to do a little bit of surgery on that phrase. The first word should be chopped off and discarded, for a start. However, ‘new year’ was a fact. Nothing she could do about that. Time was going to march on whether she wanted it to or not, but ‘happy’ just seemed ridiculous, maybe even a little insulting.

A rush of emotion hit her, engulfing her so completely that she briefly considered sprinting up the stairs and diving back under her duvet. She turned to Gabi, ready to make her excuses, but the look in her friend’s eyes silenced her. Although she was clearly perplexed at Anna’s dishevelled state and more than a little concerned, there was something else shimmering under the surface, a look Anna recognized.

‘There’s someone you like at this party, isn’t there?’ she asked, because that sparkle behind Gabi’s eyes only ever appeared when romance was on the cards.

Gabi blinked at her innocently. ‘No.’

Hmm. Anna wasn’t so sure she believed that.

‘Don’t look at me that way,’ Gabi added, frowning. ‘After Joel, I’m done with men, remember?’

Anna nodded slightly. ‘I do remember you telling me that.’ Whether it lasted remained to be seen. Right at that second, Anna would have bet twenty quid on her friend’s lips being locked onto someone else’s come midnight.

But Anna couldn’t begrudge her that. The break-up with Joel had been almost five years ago. To be honest, Anna hadn’t been sad to see the back of him – he hadn’t appreciated Gabi nearly enough – but Gabi hadn’t seen it that way and she’d been broken-hearted. Since then, there had been a handful of short-lived relationships. Gabi liked guys who were confident, but more often than not, ‘confident’ turned out to be ‘cocky and self-absorbed’. Not qualities that lent themselves to a mature, long-lasting partnership.

‘It’s true,’ Gabi added, looking so convincing Anna almost believed her. ‘Are you ready?’

Anna glanced up at the staircase, beyond which her duvet cocoon lay waiting, and sighed. At least one of them should have something to hope for this evening as they crossed the threshold from this old, tired year into the fresh blankness of the next.

She forced the corners of her mouth to turn up. ‘Of course. Give me two seconds. I’ll just grab my coat and put on my shoes.’

Chapter Two

IN AN IDEAL world, Anna thought, I would arrive at every party an hour and a half late. That way she could skip the beginning, when everyone was buzzing with optimism about the night ahead, full of loud hellos and instantly forgotten introductions.

Gabi worked as a food stylist, in charge of making the pictures of dishes in cookbooks and magazines appear mouth-watering. Over the years, she’d encountered an eclectic mixture of people, from photographers and art directors, to magazine editors, stylists and TV presenters. The party that evening was being hosted by an ex-pat Californian who owned a chain of south London beauty salons. Vanessa lived in Chislehurst, and as Anna drove to their destination, the houses became progressively grander, the streets leafier. It was only a couple of miles away from Anna’s semi-detached in Sundridge Park, but it seemed like a different world.

She trailed around the ground floor of the stylish house behind Gabi, a glass of untouched fizz in her hand. Every time Gabi managed to extricate herself from one group of excitable extroverts, she was instantly dragged into another, most of whom Anna didn’t know. Anna just hovered around the edges, keeping her expression friendly but neutral, and avoiding eye contact as much as possible.

The advantage of having a more outgoing friend who seemed to know ninety per cent of the other guests was that the conversation eddied around Anna, much the same way a stream flowed around a rock in its path, and that was fine by her. Because with small talk came questions, and she wasn’t particularly keen on questions, not the personal kind, anyway, and the one question she really didn’t want to hear was—

‘Hey, Anna! How are you?’

She fixed a smile in place and turned to find another of Gabi’s creative, interesting friends smiling at her. ‘Oh, er, hi…’ Anna trailed off, partly because she couldn’t remember the woman’s name, but mostly because this one simple question always left her in a quandary. She was basically an honest sort of person, so when somebody asked her how she was, her automatic response was to tell the truth.

Big mistake.

Back in the early days, she’d done just that, launching into a description of how each second of the day was a painful knife-stab in her heart, how she dreaded opening her eyelids each morning. It had been so wonderful to let it all out.

But she’d soon discovered it was a great way to make her friends’ faces fall, to cause them to stammer awkwardly. More often than not, they’d invented someone on the other side of the room they urgently needed to talk to and had scurried away.

No one really wanted to hear how she was. Not after two years, nine months and eight days. Not even Gabi. Instead, they wanted to hear she was putting herself back together, that it was possible to heal from something that tragic and move on. It was selfish, really, because they were asking her to give them hope. They were asking her to reassure them that if something that awful happened to them, they’d eventually be okay too. But Anna wasn’t okay. She wasn’t even close.

Gabi’s friend was looking at her, eyebrows raised, waiting for an answer.

‘Doing good,’ Anna replied, nodding, and noticed, once again, how grief had turned her into a big fat liar. ‘How about you?’

The woman – Keisha! Her name was Keisha – nodded philosophically. ‘Oh, you know. Same old, same old…’ And then her brows drew together. ‘I heard about… you know… I’m so sorry.’ And then she did the worst possible thing: she placed a sympathetic hand on Anna’s arm. It burned.

Anna wanted to shrug it off, to glare at Keisha for stepping over an unmarked boundary, but she didn’t. ‘Oh, look!’ she said, staring at the air past the other woman’s head to the opposite side of the large and glossy open-plan kitchen. ‘I think Vanessa is looking for you.’

Their hostess was actually nowhere to be seen, but two could play at the ‘invisible friend’ game. Keisha looked torn for a brief second, then gave Anna a swift one-armed hug and hurried off. Anna breathed out and escaped in the other direction.

She was glad when the hour hand on her watch slid past nine and people got beyond the ‘meet and greet’ phase and settled into small groups, leaning against kitchen counters, staking out their places in the various seating areas. It made it easier to skirt around the edges of the party, glass of warm fizz in hand, giving the impression she’d just finished a fabulous conversation with one person and was on her way to another, when really – aside from that brief exchange with Keisha – the only person she’d properly engaged with all evening had been Gabi, and that had been in the car on the way there.

They’d barely pulled out of Anna’s road when Gabi had said in a very off-hand way, ‘Did I mention Jeremy is coming tonight?’

Anna had glanced sharply across at her friend in the passenger seat. Gabi had been sitting calmly, hands folded in her lap, the hint of an angelic smile on her lips. That had troubled Anna, because Gabi didn’t do cool and matter-of-fact. Gabi did squeals and smiles and showers of confetti. Over everything. The churning in the pit of Anna’s stomach had intensified.

‘Oh?’ she’d said, deliberately keeping her tone light. ‘Remind me who he is again?’ Even though she’d known full well that Jeremy was a pal of Vanessa’s. Even though she’d known he was a graphic designer and had an ‘amazing’ flat in Beckenham.

Anna had known it was only going to be a matter of time before that particular grenade landed because Gabi had been casually dropping his name into conversation for weeks now, almost as frequently as she hinted – not always so obliquely – that it was time for Anna to ‘move on’.

But Anna didn’t want to move on. She wasn’t ready.

However, the fact she’d said this a thousand times had obviously had no impact on Gabi at all, because there her friend was, smile barely contained, weaving her way through the crowded kitchen with a man in tow.

And the penny finally dropped. It hadn’t been her own romantic prospects Gabi had been getting all sparkly and hopeful about earlier on that evening – it had been Anna’s.

Anna turned to slip away in the opposite direction but found herself blocked by a gaggle of Vanessa’s beauty salon employees, blinged up and colourful like exotic birds. They’d set up camp next to the glass-fronted fridge containing nothing but champagne and didn’t seem inclined to budge.

‘I thought I’d lost you!’ Gabi said, breaking into one of her Julia Roberts-style grins. She glanced over to the man whose arm she had hold of, who, it had to be said, wasn’t looking as enthusiastic about this encounter as Gabi was. ‘This is Jeremy!’ Gabi said, with the same degree of fanfare more suited to announcing an Oscar winner. Tall with sandy-blond hair, Jeremy had the kind of sharp cheekbones that reminded Anna of the detective in the Swedish crime series she was currently bingeing on Netflix.

‘Remember I told you about him?’

Anna shot Gabi a look. Seriously? You’re really doing this?

Undeterred, Gabi countered with a look of her own – Don’t mess this up! – and carried on talking. ‘You know you were saying you wanted to try salsa classes? Well, Jeremy here has been going to some at the Civic Centre. He can tell you all about them.’ Gabi then came to the startling realization that everyone’s glasses needed topping up and, despite being right next to a fridge packed with champagne, skipped off in the opposite direction to find some. That left Anna and Jeremy staring awkwardly at one another.

Anna took a breath, smiled and said, ‘Hello.’ Yes, she was feeling a bit antisocial at the moment, but she wasn’t rude. That was also why, as they began tiptoeing through the small talk, she didn’t tell him salsa classes had been Gabi’s idea. Something to get Anna out of the house. Something to take her mind off things. Before that, it had been conversational Italian, and before that, silver jewellery making. Even flipping car maintenance.

And so that was how Anna ended up talking to Jeremy in the kitchen for half an hour. He was a nice man, she decided. Not too full of himself. Not boring. And he’d obviously been blindsided by Gabi’s not-so-subtle attempt at matchmaking too. He was trying his best to hide it but not quite succeeding. Anna liked him more for that.

When he suggested moving outside to get away from the crush and noise of the kitchen, she followed him. ‘So, how did you become such a salsa expert?’ she asked, as they made their way out onto the deck overlooking the immaculate back garden.

Jeremy made a face. ‘I definitely wouldn’t call myself an expert.’

‘No? How long have you been taking lessons?’

He rubbed a hand over his face and laughed. He had a nice smile, Anna thought. There was a twinkle in his eyes, a warmth there, something genuine. ‘Well, that’s just it… I’ve only been a handful of times, and that was because my sister was desperate to go and my brother-in-law flat-out refused.’

Anna laughed along with him. Not a full-on belly laugh, more a soft chuckle, but it shocked her so much she fell silent again almost instantly. The sound was foreign to her ears, the gentle juddering of her shoulders, alien. How long had it been since she’d last laughed? She wanted to answer ‘days’, but that would be bare-faced lying. ‘Weeks’ was also probably a tad optimistic.

Maybe that was why she threw herself into the conversation with this nice man more fully, why she found herself not just standing there, smiling and nodding in the right places, but talking back, sharing little bits of information about herself. Maybe that was why, when he told her about the salsa classes and said he’d brave them again should she wish to go and not want to walk through the door alone, she said she’d think about it.

It struck her, as she steered the conversation towards another subject, that Gabi had picked well. Very well. Because in another life, another reality, she might be feeling butterflies at the thought of dancing with Jeremy, at the thought of placing her hand in his, feeling the brush of his palm against hers when they moved. As they leaned on the deck railing, Jeremy kept looking at her, and every time he did, she was surprised to discover delicate wings tickled her inside.

But Anna knew not to pay much heed to the fluttering. Butterflies were short-lived creatures and, given the frost hardening the depths of her soul, they’d probably be dead soon. Frozen stiff, poor things.

Even so, when Jeremy took the glass of warm, flat champagne from her hand to get her a fresh one, their fingers brushed, and the butterflies started to panic.

That brief touch tripped a secret alarm inside her, like a cashier pressing an under-the-desk button during a bank raid. Red lights flashed in the vault of her heart every few seconds. Sirens blared inside the confines of her skull as Jeremy pushed his way through the crowd back towards the kitchen.

Don’t care if he’s nice-looking, the alarm yelled. Even really nice-looking. He’s not Spencer.

Don’t care if he’s intelligent, sensitive and gently serious in a way that’s appealing, in a way Spencer never was. Don’t care that this Jeremy person might never crack a joke every time you tried to talk about something deep or important. He’s not him. Never will be.

Anna tried to ignore the nagging alarm when Jeremy returned. She tried to listen to an anecdote about a particularly demanding design client he’d had, but the pulsing warning was there in the back of her head as his gaze began to linger longer on hers, as a little bubble of intimacy began to close around them.

Oh, heck. She knew where this was going.

In less than half an hour, he might gently touch her arm while making a point. Maybe, when Big Ben’s chimes rang out across the nation, he’d lean in and kiss her softly on the lips. Her stomach plummeted at the thought. She felt hot and prickly all over.

Not Spencer, the warning flashed again. Not Spencer. Not Spencer. Not Spencer.

Anna tried to smile and nod as Jeremy kept talking, but she felt sick and giddy at the same time. This really wouldn’t do. She had to find a way to make it all stop.

But then Jeremy segued into a story about a stag do he’d been on, where he and his pals had spent an afternoon driving racing cars at Goodwood. Anna grabbed the lifeline he offered without hesitation.

‘I bought my husband one of those experience days for his birthday,’ she said. ‘Supercars… He was mad about Aston Martins.’

Jeremy opened his mouth to say, ‘Oh, really?’ but then her words caught up with him, and he faltered. He nodded a couple of times, a filler action, she guessed, designed to give him time to regroup. ‘Aston Martin?’ he finally said, his head still bobbing. ‘Good choice.’

He was momentarily stalled, she realized, but not shocked at the mention of a husband, as most men might have been if a woman at a party had been talking to them exclusively for more than an hour with no sign of a significant other.

‘Gabi told you about Spencer,’ she said. A statement, not a question.

‘A little,’ he replied, and she had to give him credit – he maintained eye contact, didn’t look away or do the invent-a-friend routine. Up until then, their conversation had been plain sailing, but he didn’t run when the waters got choppy. He stayed and navigated the lurching awkwardness that followed her revelation. The man had class.

But Anna couldn’t let that make a difference, so she launched into the story of what happened two years, nine months and eight days ago: how her husband had gone out one evening to the corner shop to buy a bottle of wine. How he’d never returned because someone else had drunk too much wine the very same evening, and then that person had got behind the wheel of a car. It had only been a three-minute walk to the shop.

She’d told Jeremy how she’d heard the sirens as the ambulance arrived and how she’d just known that something was very, very wrong. How she’d left the front door open and had run out of the house in her bare feet, even though it had been March. How she’d seen Spencer lying in the road, surrounded by paramedics. How their faces had been white. Grim. How he’d been pronounced ‘dead on arrival’ when the ambulance had made it to the hospital.

She told Jeremy every last detail while he watched her, not horrified or embarrassed, but with compassion in his eyes. True compassion, not pity.

And that was why Anna made sure every word was a brick, and that she built each brick into a wall. A boundary line. And when she had finished her tale, she was on one side, and Jeremy was on the other.

Still he didn’t turn tail. Damn him.

‘About the salsa lessons…’ he began. ‘I get the feeling they’re more Gabi’s idea.’

‘They are,’ she said simply. Truthfully.

He nodded, understanding there would be no salsa-ing for the two of them any time soon. Probably not ever.

‘It was nice meeting you, Anna,’ he said gently, looking her straight in the eye. Not in a romantic way (she’d definitely squashed that vibe) but in an honest way, letting her know he really meant it.

Anna nodded in reply and swallowed down the stray words forming in her throat, afraid they might form a request for him to stay, to keep talking to her as if she was a human being and not a walking tragedy that needed gentle handling.

He glanced towards the house. ‘There’s someone I need to…’ He didn’t finish the sentence but gave her a rueful smile before turning and walking back indoors. Anna watched the back of his head appearing and disappearing as he made his way through the crowded kitchen.

He’d fallen back on the old invisible friend routine after all, but far from hating him for it, she was grateful. He’d done it to save her any further discomfort, not himself. Jeremy had seen her bricks, he’d seen her wall, and he’d respected them. Tears sprang to her eyes.

She was still standing there, staring blurrily through the vast folding glass doors into the house, when Gabi bounded up. ‘Where’s Jeremy?’

Anna was pretty sure her friend was here asking her this question because she’d spotted him back inside the house on his own. ‘He had someone he needed to talk to,’ she said, and ignored the flicker of warmth at the idea of being connected to him through this little white lie, a secret just between the two of them. She turned to face the lawn and stared out into the darkness.

Gabi looked crestfallen. ‘But… But it looked as if you were getting on really well.’

‘We were.’

‘You were talking for ages.’

Anna nodded again. She felt a stab of guilt in her stomach. She really hadn’t been fair to Jeremy, chatting to him for so long. And then the knife of guilt, only a flesh wound at that point, plunged itself deeper, twisted and turned. She hadn’t been fair to Spencer, either. ‘What were you thinking, Gabi?’

Gabi feigned ignorance for only a split-second before she crumbled. She looked beseechingly at Anna and shook her head. ‘I don’t know… I was just thinking that he’s a nice guy and that… And that…’

Anna’s jaw tightened. ‘If you say I need to move on, I’m going to dump this glass of champagne right over your head.’

Gabi’s expression grew earnest. ‘But you do need—’

That was it. Anna had had enough. She didn’t make good on her threat, but she did fling the glass over the railing of the deck and onto the lawn, where it rolled down the slope and landed under a bush. Vanessa would kill her if she ever found out.

‘I don’t need to move on!’ she yelled. ‘It’s only been two years!’

Gabi opened her mouth, and Anna knew she was going to – quite correctly – point out that it had been closer to three, but she took in Anna’s warning expression and shut it again.

‘What am I supposed to do? Just snap my fingers and say, “Oh, well! The love of my life, the man I adored with every fibre of my being, is gone, so I’d better just pick a replacement?” As if he was last year’s fashion trend?’

‘Okay, no… I…’

Anna could see the hurt in her friend’s eyes, but it didn’t slow her down one bit. Too bad, Gabi. You’re the one who pushed and pushed, the one who prodded this tiger out of its numb sleep, and now you’re going to hear it roar!

‘When you’ve had a relationship that’s lasted more than eighteen months, maybe then you can start telling me how to live my life!’

Gabi flinched. Anna knew she’d hit below the belt, that she was going to feel horrible about this when she calmed down, but she had to make Gabi stop. She had to make her see.

There had to be an end to the Italian lessons, to the jewellery making and the salsa dancing. To the Jeremys. Because Anna knew there would be more of them paraded out for her to meet if she didn’t stand up for herself now. She had to make Gabi understand that she wasn’t going to magically get over Spencer if she learned to conjugate the verb essere or perform a perfect ‘side basic’. She wasn’t going to get over him ever.

‘So don’t tell me to move on. Because you don’t get it. You don’t understand! Not until you’ve lived through it!’

And, before Gabi could offer any words in her defence, Anna turned and strode across the deck, heading for the gate at the side of the house. Thankfully, it wasn’t locked. She couldn’t have faced pushing her way back through all those people inside.

You couldn’t face having to turn around and see Gabi standing there, silent tears stinging her eyes, a little voice inside her head goaded, but Anna drowned it out by wrenching the gate open and slamming it shut behind her hard enough to make the latch rattle. And then she marched to the cul de sac where she’d parked her car, climbed in, and drove herself home.

Chapter Three

ANNA DIDN’T BOTHER turning the lights on when she got back home. She headed straight up the stairs and into the master bedroom. The digital alarm clock on the bedside table blinked the time: 11:36. She turned away from it.

If she didn’t look at it, she couldn’t see the numbers getting higher and higher, finally reaching that dreaded row of zeros. And if she couldn’t see them, it wasn’t real. Midnight was a threshold she didn’t want to cross. Not just this particular midnight, which loomed over her like a threatening shadow, but every midnight. Every day without him was one too many.

Anna had developed little rituals to help her get through the days and nights, and she needed one of those now. She walked over to Spencer’s built-in wardrobe. After dropping her handbag on the floor, she curled her fingers around the handles and eased the doors open. All his suits and shirts were still hanging there just where he’d left them. She knew it was a horrible cliché, but she couldn’t bring herself to throw them into a bin bag or take them down to the charity shop.

She sighed and pulled the sleeve of the nearest shirt towards her, held it up to her face and breathed in. His scent was no longer there, even though she refused to wash any of them, but she pretended it was. Every time she did this, she tried to recall it precisely, but it was getting harder and harder to do.

Spencer would have laughed at her for being so sentimental, but then Spencer had laughed at everything, made a joke of everything. It had charmed and infuriated her in equal measures. He’d even done it the first time she’d told him she loved him.

That frosty November evening nine years earlier had been magical. They’d been out to dinner in central London to celebrate their two-month anniversary, but instead of catching the Tube back to Charing Cross, they’d opted to wander beside the Thames, strolling along Victoria Embankment, with its sturdy stone walls, globe-like lamps decorated with ugly, bulbous-headed Victorian fish, and wooden benches with strange mythical creatures woven into the wrought-iron supports. The lights of Festival Hall and the Southbank Centre had twinkled across the water at them, and the London Eye, glowing bluish-white, had kept watch.

Spencer had pulled her into his arms and kissed her, before holding her face between his palms, looking deep into her eyes and saying, so simply, so seriously, ‘I love you.’ Then his face had broken into a huge grin. ‘I’m sorry,’ he’d said, laughing, ‘I just couldn’t hold it in any longer.’

She’d felt dizzy and breathless. Spencer had a way of doing that to her, of making her question if up was down and down was up; he was the magnet to her compass needle.

‘I love you too,’ she’d whispered back, and his smile had grown even wider, but then the edges of his mouth had turned downwards.

‘I beg your pardon?’ he’d said, mischief twinkling in his eyes. ‘I don’t think I quite heard you.’

She’d laughed softly, then had cleared her throat and tried again, louder this time. ‘I love you too.’

Spencer had cupped a hand to his ear. ‘Nope! Still can’t hear you.’ She’d punched him playfully on the arm. He’d kept moving closer and closer until their lips had almost touched, then he’d suddenly let go of her and had leaped onto one of the benches facing the river, feet planted wide, arms outstretched. ‘When you love someone,’ he’d shouted, ‘you don’t say it quietly, you proclaim it from the rooftops! Like this…’ And he’d bellowed to the seagulls sitting on the ropes of lights between the lampposts. ‘I love you, Anna Mason! I’ve loved you since the day I met you and I always will!’

He’d held out his hand to her and she’d taken it, let him help her up onto the bench so she’d been standing beside him, trying not to let the heels of her boots get stuck between the wooden slats. He’d grinned at her, waiting for her to follow suit, and she’d almost yelled her own declaration of love into the night air, but something had stopped her. Instead, she’d turned to face him. Sometimes, Spencer needed to know that his way wasn’t the only way.

‘You heard, you idiot,’ she’d mumbled into his ear, and then she’d kissed him just as softly and just as sweetly as he’d kissed her.

After that, it had become their ‘thing’ – if she said ‘I love you’ first, he always responded with: ‘I beg your pardon?’, and then she’d cap it off by whispering: ‘You heard, idiot’. She’d imagined them saying it to each other well into their eighties…

A sob escaped her lips and she sank to the floor of the wardrobe, taking both shirt and hanger with her, and then she buried her face in the blue-and-white striped cotton and cried until there were no tears left.

How was it possible to ache for someone this way? Not just metaphorically, but literally? Now she understood why people talked about having a broken heart, because she knew it was entirely possible for it to throb in pain along with every single beat.

She lost track of time, curled up on the wardrobe floor with Spencer’s shirt clutched to her chest. Eventually, though, she blinked, regained the sense of where and who she was. The ache didn’t stop, though. It never stopped.

She reached out to retrieve her bag from the bedroom floor and then returned to the wardrobe. Once she was huddled with her back against the wall, she pulled her phone out and pressed a button to wake it up.

Eleven fifty-six. It was almost midnight.

Anna closed her eyes and tried to stop time through the sheer strength of her will. Four minutes. Probably less than that – three and a bit – was all she had left of this year before it slid away, taking another piece of Spencer with it.

It didn’t work. When she opened her eyes again, another minute had evaporated. She stared at the phone as an inner battle began to rage. There was another ritual, you see. One that was even less healthy. In the sane part of her head, she knew that. That was why she’d banned herself from doing it. She was trying, even if Gabi didn’t think she was.

Put the phone down, she told herself. You promised yourself you wouldn’t do this again, remember? It had been months since she’d been this weak.

But she didn’t put the phone down. Slowly, deliberately, she pressed the screen and pulled up her contacts, and then, just as slowly, just as deliberately, she located Spencer’s name and hit ‘call’.

Even before it connected, she could hear the message – hear his voice – in her head: Hey! This is Spencer. I’m off having fun without you right now, but if you really have to leave a dull and boring message, you know what to do…

Oh, how she longed to do just that, to pour it all out to him, but she didn’t. It wasn’t enough. She wanted to talk to him, yes, but she didn’t want an empty, one-sided conversation. She wanted to hear his voice, his real voice, not a tinny recording from years ago. She wanted him to talk back to her. And then she could finally say what she should have said to him that last evening before he’d walked out the front door to go to the corner shop, something more meaningful than: ‘Can you grab a pint of milk while you’re there?’

Her thumb hovered above the ‘end call’ button. In all the times she’d dialled his number just to hear his voicemail greeting, she’d never once left that message because, even though Gabi might tell her she was stuck in the past, she really wasn’t. She wasn’t kidding herself. This was just an echo of him, nothing more. She knew she couldn’t bring him back.

But it seemed that if she was going to fall from grace this evening, she was going to do it spectacularly. Maybe it was because she saw the time at the top of the phone change to a row of perfect nothingness that she did it. Maybe it was all the swelling emotions inside her from that evening clamouring to be let out. Who knew? All Anna understood was that all the words she thought she’d have a lifetime to say were stuck in the logjam of her throat, and then, suddenly, three escaped. They would have to be enough.

‘I love you…’ she whispered in a voice that was raw with tears.

There was a heartbeat of silence, then another.

And then the reply came.

‘I beg your pardon?’

Chapter Four

SOMETIMES, WAKING UP is like emerging from a gentle, white fog. Slowly, the mist clears, and one finds oneself refreshed and ready to face the morning, seeing and thinking clearly. Unfortunately for Anna, waking up the following day was more like the aftermath of being buried alive in an avalanche. Her sleep had been blessedly blank and white, but it felt as if something heavy was sitting on her chest, pinning her to the bed, and she couldn’t quite make sense of her surroundings. She lay there, unable to move, unable to think. Eventually she began to punch herself free.

The first step was to get her eyelids open. She blinked a few times and just about managed, even though one eye was being more co-operative than the other, and turned to focus on the clock, but where she’d expected to see a digital display, there was now an old-fashioned alarm clock with bells on the top and little brass feet.

Even though the thick curtains were drawn, only barely emitting light, she realized the window was in the wrong place. It should have been on the right side of the room, but it was clearly on the left.

She sat up in bed, frowning, and then – finally – it all began to fall into place. She wasn’t in her bedroom, but the spare room. She rubbed a hand over her gritty eyes and her stomach lurched.

Oh, God. Last night… The phone call.

She didn’t even remember hearing Spencer’s voicemail greeting, she realized, only what had come afterwards – the voice, the one that had spoken where there should have been only emptiness and silence.

When she’d heard it, she’d immediately thrown the phone into the far reaches of the wardrobe, then had half-crawled, half-scrabbled her way across the bedroom floor until she’d reached the opposite wall, where she’d sat with her back pressed up against it, her knees pulled up against her body, staring at the open wardrobe as if a ghostly apparition might emerge at any second. At some point, she’d stopped shaking enough to stand up, stumble from the room and make it across the hallway, where she’d collapsed into this bed and, if the bedclothes were anything to go by, had slept fitfully and frantically.

She’d had all sorts of strange dreams after Spencer had died, ones where they’d been living their normal lives, and they had seemed so real that waking up again had been like being back in those first awful days after the accident. And then there were the nightmares…

But the dreams weren’t always bad. Sometimes, in that twilight between sleeping and waking, she’d imagine him there in the bed beside her, warm and solid and alive. Once or twice she was sure she’d felt his breath on her back, his fingers brushing her thigh, but when she’d woken up properly, his side of the bed had been cool and unwrinkled. She’d assumed it was her subconscious refusing to accept the truth, trying to fill the gaping hole he’d left behind.

Had last night been something like that? She’d been upset leaving the party. It could have triggered something…

Anna pondered the idea as she shifted position, realizing she’d got distracted and hadn’t actually registered the time on the alarm clock. She turned her head to take another look.

Eleven thirty-two? She sprang out of bed.

She was supposed to be having a New Year’s Day lunch with Spencer’s parents at half past twelve, and it was a forty-five-minute drive to Epsom – at the very least. That meant she had to get into the car, well, now!

But one quick glance in the mirror confirmed that plan was a bust before it had even got underway. She was still wearing the same wrinkled black dress from the night before, her tights had a ladder that started under her heel and disappeared up under her hemline, and her hair looked as if she’d been caught in a hurricane.

There was no time to analyse what had happened last night now. She had to get herself in the shower and dressed in a presentable manner in under fifteen minutes, and then, even if she flirted with the speed limit all the way to Epsom, she was still going to be cutting it really fine.

Spencer’s mum was a stickler about punctuality, and Anna always made sure to turn up to their fortnightly Sunday lunches on the dot of half past twelve, even if they never ate until one. While Spencer had been famously late for everything, and Anna couldn’t remember one family function she’d been to with him where they hadn’t arrived at least half an hour after they were supposed to, Gayle seemed to hold her daughter-inlaw to a different standard.

Maybe that was because the lunches had started not long after Spencer had died, a way to support each other through that awful time, to laugh and cry and remember him, and the tradition had just kept going, no one brave enough to suggest otherwise. Being late would have seemed disrespectful.

By noon Anna had got a grip of herself and made it into her car. By twenty past, she was joining the M25 and putting her foot down. It was raining hard, that horrible, cold, icy stuff that would have been sleet if the temperature had been a degree or two cooler. She put the windscreen wipers on max and forced herself to overtake a few cars and lorries instead of hugging the slow lane, as she usually would have done in such weather. However, the journey was a familiar one, and it wasn’t long before she was driving mostly on automatic pilot, allowing her thoughts to wander.

What had really happened last night?

There were only two possibilities: either she’d heard the voice on the phone – Spencer’s voice? – for real, or she’d thought she’d heard it. Neither scenario calmed her down much – option one was just too ‘out there’ to consider, and option two meant she was starting off the New Year by having a nervous breakdown.

Because he hadn’t just said any old words, had he? He’d said, ‘I beg your pardon?’ Their words, their thing.

Had she just wanted to hear it come back to her so badly that she’d imagined it? It had to be that. She’d been running off emotion last night, even before she’d got home and ended up curled on the floor of her dead husband’s wardrobe. Look at how she’d spoken to Gabi…

Oh, God. Gabi!

She’d forgotten to call her last night to apologize. She was a horrible, horrible friend!

Anna was usually a very careful driver, so much so that Spencer had taken to calling her ‘Grandma’ when she’d got behind the wheel, but she swerved onto the hard shoulder and brought the car to a stop. This was an emergency. Her handbag was on the passenger seat, and she delved into it with her left hand and started rummaging around. It was only when her fingers reached the lining at the bottom that she realized her mistake.

Her phone was still sitting in the bottom of the wardrobe, where she’d thrown it after the call. As bad as she felt about Gabi, there was nothing she could do about it now. It would have to wait until she got home later that afternoon.

Anna squinted at the road ahead, indicated and pulled back into the traffic. The voice – his voice – replayed itself inside her head as she did so.

I beg your pardon?

Just what Spencer would have said, but it hadn’t been filled with barely contained laughter or the husky softness she would have expected. He’d sounded so serious, so sad. As if he’d been aching every bit as badly as she had at their separation.

That made sense, in a weird way. But also, it didn’t. Why, if she’d invented it, hadn’t she imagined Spencer’s usual cheeky tone? That was what she’d been yearning to hear, after all, his very Spencerness, captured in an inflexion, a nuance, to hear the smile in his words. Why had she made him sound so mournful?

Spencer would have laughed at her for letting her imagination run away with her, but was it really so ridiculous? They’d always said their love was special. Once, when they’d been at a dinner party and one of his friends had said he’d want his wife to move on and marry again if something happened to him, Spencer had quipped that he wasn’t that generous, that he’d find a way to come back because Anna was his and always would be his. What if he’d found a way to do that? No one really knew what happened after you’d died, did they? It was the one area where science could never prod its curious fingers. What if something beautiful, something impossible, had occurred?

No, she told herself. Just no.

It couldn’t be true. Because what was she going to do if it was? March into her in-laws’ house for lunch and calmly announce that she’d had a chat with their dearly departed son the night before? It sounded ridiculous. It was ridiculous.

Okay, good. Anna released a shaky breath. Putting it in context like that helped. So what if it hadn’t all been a dream? That didn’t mean all of it had been real, either. It was probably a mixture of reality, imagination and emotion – that was what she was going to tell herself if she started freaking out about it again. And she would keep telling herself that all the way through lunch that afternoon.

Chapter Five

WHAT I COULD really do with, more than anything else, Anna thought, as she arrived at Spencer’s parents’ house and killed the engine, is a hug, plain and simple. She wished she were pulling up to her own parents’ house, that it was her mother who would dry her hands on a tea towel and come running to the front door to greet her, but that wasn’t possible. Not unless she wanted to jump on a plane and travel almost three thousand miles.

Her parents had moved to Canada not long after she and Spencer had married. Anna’s mother worked as a conference centre manager for an international chain of hotels, and the kind of position she’d been working towards her whole career had come up. The only snag? It was in Nova Scotia. Anna’s father had just retired from being a civil engineer, and their only child was settled, so they had taken the leap. The plan was to move back to the UK when her mum retired. Anna visited, of course, and they had Skype calls regularly, but it wasn’t quite the same. You couldn’t hug a screen.

Anna ran from her car and rang the Barrys’ front doorbell. Quarter past one. She’d never been this late before.

Gayle answered. She smiled at Anna, but there was a stiffness in her posture as she leaned in and kissed her briefly on the cheek. No hug was forthcoming. ‘You’re running a bit late,’ she said, taking in Anna’s woolly jumper and jeans, which were definitely not as smart as her usual family lunch attire, but Anna had barely had time to find anything clean, let alone iron anything.

‘Um… yes. Traffic was a bit bad.’ She nodded towards the rain, still falling in large, icy drops beyond the overhang of the porch.

‘Well, we managed to hold off a bit,’ Gayle said, opening the door wide. ‘But you’re here in the nick of time – we were just about to sit down.’ And she led the way through the house to the large dining room that overlooked the garden.

Spencer’s older brother, Scott, was already there, helping to carry covered dishes in from the kitchen. Anna always felt a little jab in her ribs every time she saw him. He looked so much like his younger sibling. Both boys had inherited their mother’s fair hair and blue eyes, although Spencer had always looked the more boyish. Scott’s features were sharper, his expression naturally more sombre.

He and his wife had announced just before Christmas that she was expecting their first child at the end of May. Teresa gave Anna a little nod as she arrived from the kitchen, carrying a dish full of stuffing balls. Anna couldn’t help looking at her stomach, trying to work out if there were the beginnings of a bump there under her loose top. While she was overjoyed for the couple, she felt a little flush of envy every time she thought about it.

She tried to help but was shooed away, so she slid into her normally assigned seat at the bottom of the table. Spencer’s dad, Richard, winked at Anna, making her feel slightly less as if she had her tail between her legs for being late. Spencer had taken after his father, a man who had, apparently, been telling ‘dad jokes’ well before he’d actually become a dad. Anna gave him a conspiratorial smile back and felt her shoulder muscles unclench.

When lunch was over, they retired to the living room. This was Anna’s favourite part of the afternoon. The tradition had started right after Spencer had died. To while away the hours doing something other than drinking endless cups of tea, they’d looked through the photo albums together, trying to pick a few for the upcoming funeral.

It hadn’t been an easy job to narrow it down to just a couple. With his mischievous blue eyes and boyish grin, Spencer had been very photogenic. And even after the funeral, they’d kept going with it. It had been comforting to see him smiling back from the pages at them, just being Spencer. It still was.

Gayle went to the special shelf on the bookcase that contained the large albums, all arranged in date order, and pulled one from the left-hand end.

Toddler pics? Again? It seemed an awfully long time since they’d looked at anything from the other end of the shelf, from any of the albums Anna might have a chance of featuring in, and she really could do with seeing some solid evidence of her time together with Spencer today, because everything seemed to be upside-down and back-to-front. An anchor of some sort might have been helpful.

She nodded along as usual anyway as Gayle leafed through the album, making the appropriate noises at the right times, and it wasn’t hard to do because she did love seeing all these favourite pictures of her husband – the one of him on top of a lion in Trafalgar Square, or the one of him with the snowman he’d built in the back garden.

Anna looked over at her mother-in-law, with her perfectly coiffed, Mary Berry-style hairdo, her erect posture and precise movements. Her fierce loyalty and protectiveness towards her family were truly admirable, but they came with a downside. Gayle was the sort of mother who believed no woman was good enough for her baby boys, and it had taken a while for Anna not to feel like an outsider at family gatherings.

But after Spencer had died, that had changed. Gayle had clung to her, opened her arms and welcomed Anna into the family in a way she never had before. They were united in their loss, their grief. She’d needed Anna. Both Scott and Richard didn’t do emotion, one buttoning down hard, the other finding safety in humour when things got too much, so Anna had been the one person Gayle had been able to talk to. They’d cried and laughed and remembered together.

Anna’s parents had come to stay as soon as they could after Spencer had died. They’d even offered to move back to England permanently, but Anna had refused, telling them they couldn’t put their lives on hold indefinitely for her. However, once they’d actually left, she’d realized how much it had helped having someone else in the house. She knew one or both of them would have dropped everything again if she’d told them she was feeling lonely, but that wouldn’t have been fair on them. So having this new, closer connection with Gayle had meant everything.

Once the photo albums were put away, a conversation began about how they’d all spent New Year’s Eve, but nobody lingered on their tales, because it was glaringly obvious that someone was missing from all of them. To make up for that, Scott relayed a story about the millennium New Year when they’d had a big reunion with Gayle’s side of the family. Anna had heard the anecdote countless times before, but it still made her smile. Fifteen-year-old Spencer had crept out of a long and boring dinner and lit £500-worth of fireworks meant for midnight while the rest of the family were still enjoying their desserts. He was lucky he hadn’t blown himself to kingdom come.

Anna glanced across the room and saw Gayle smiling widely, but her eyes were glittering, and she kept looking down at her lap as the others laughed and delved into the memory in greater detail. She suspected her mother-in-law was thinking exactly the same thing as her: that it seemed so unfair. Everyone had always joked that Spencer’s reckless side would be his undoing, so it seemed wrong that he’d been minding his own business, sensibly walking across the road, when the end had come. It made his death even harder to bear.

When there was a gap in the conversation, Anna said, ‘What about that night when Spencer stayed in and missed going up to London with everyone because Lewis was sick? He wasn’t always impossible.’

‘God, I loved that dog,’ Richard chipped in, smiling. ‘Only one in this household who took me seriously!’

Gayle turned to face Anna. ‘Did Spencer tell you about that?’

‘No.’

‘But you weren’t on the scene then, were you?’

Anna took a moment before she answered. She didn’t want to contradict her mother-in-law, but she wasn’t going to lie. ‘We’d only just got together. It was all very new.’

Gayle frowned. ‘I don’t think you were.’ And she went on to supplant Anna’s story with one of her own.

Anna stayed quiet. She knew she was right, because that had been her and Spencer’s first New Year’s Eve together. They’d spent it here in this house, cuddled up on the sofa with the poorly dog. Even if her mother-in-law didn’t remember, why had she pressed the point, and – to be honest – been a little snippy? Was this punishment for holding up lunch?

However, if Gayle was annoyed, she showed none of it as she recounted an incident from when Spencer had still been in primary school. In fact, her usually prickly demeanour melted away and she laughed and gesticulated as she told how Spencer had hidden behind the sofa so he could stay up to watch the new year in with the family. They’d found him asleep there in the morning, after a great deal of panic about his empty bed. This memory was safe territory for Gayle. No danger of anyone not born a Barry accidentally trespassing in it.

Anna nodded and smiled along – she couldn’t do anything else, having no personal knowledge of the incident – but as she sat there, she realized this hadn’t been the first time that Gayle had been a little ‘off’ with her in recent months. She hadn’t thought anything of it at first. Her mother-in-law had never been an easy person to get along with, so she’d merely assumed it was just Gayle being Gayle. Maybe she was being uncharitable, but now she was starting to think otherwise.

Chapter Six

ANNA FELT A little nervous as she walked up the path to Gabi’s block of flats. She’d stopped off at a service station on the way back from Gayle and Richard’s, where she’d picked up a bottle of red wine and a large Toblerone. She balanced them in one hand while she pressed the intercom with the other.

‘Hello?’

‘It’s me,’ Anna said, her voice less confident than she wanted it to sound. ‘Can I come in?’

Usually, the buzzer would have sounded immediately, but today there was thick silence. After a few seconds, however, the door hummed and clicked. Anna stepped inside the communal hallway and began to climb the stairs to the first floor.

Gabi opened her front door, smile noticeably absent, and allowed Anna to walk past her into the living room. Anna perched on the edge of the sofa and looked around the room she knew so well. While she went for clean lines and neutral tones, Gabi’s decorating style was more colourful and eclectic.

What always stood out to Anna was the number of photograph frames cramming every single surface, of all Gabi’s family back in Brazil. Not only were there plenty of pictures of her parents and siblings – two brothers and three sisters – but there were snaps of uncles and aunties, nieces and nephews too. From what Gabi had told Anna, they were a large, close-knit family, always in each other’s business but always there when they needed each other. Being an only child, Anna had often wished for a family like that.

She and Gabi had met in their early twenties when Gabi had moved from São Paolo to London for university, and they’d instantly hit it off. However, it was after Anna’s parents had left for Canada that they’d really become close, bonding over both having their family thousands of miles away. Gabi had become the sister Anna had never had, which was why she was determined to fix this.

She placed the chocolate and the bottle of wine on the coffee table. Gabi sat down on the armchair across the room, back straight, arms folded.

‘I’m so sorry, Gabi. I was a total bitch last night.’

‘Yes, you were.’

Anna swallowed. ‘Did you get home okay?’

Gabi raised an eyebrow and shot Anna a look that said: Seriously?

Anna buried her face in her hands. ‘I know, I know… I don’t know what I was thinking! I was just…’ She looked up again. ‘You know I would never do anything to hurt you on purpose, don’t you? Because you’re the best friend anyone could ever have. You try to help me, put up with all my crap, and this is how I treat you. I don’t blame you if you don’t want to speak to me at the moment. I don’t blame you if you don’t want to speak to me ever again!’

Gabi’s expression softened a little. ‘There you go, being all dramatic again.’

Anna paused for a few moments and thought hard. There wasn’t much more she could say but: ‘I’m so sorry. Can you forgive me?’

Gabi sighed. ‘Maybe. But things need to change.’ She tucked one leg up underneath herself and reached for the Toblerone. ‘You need to change.’

‘I’m okay,’ Anna said, mostly on reflex.

‘No. You’re not. You walk around like a zombie most of the time, and when you do connect with the world around you – with the people around you – you go crazy!’ She shook her head. ‘It is not healthy, Anna.’

Anna wanted to disagree, but the events of the previous night loomed between them as evidence. ‘I don’t know what came over me.’

Gabi sighed again, and it struck Anna that Gabi did that a lot when she talked to her these days. She hadn’t realized she’d become the sort of friend who was hard work, but she obviously had. Maybe she hadn’t realized that because, as Gabi had so eloquently put it, she was a zombie.

And that was exactly what it felt like: as if a piece of her had died with Spencer and she’d been shuffling through life – sleepwalking – ever since.

‘I understand that some days are good, and some days are bad,’ Gabi said gently. ‘And that Christmas and New Year are hard for you, but…’

‘I know,’ Anna said again. It was all she could say. Last night was a mirror held up in front of her, one she couldn’t look away from, and she didn’t much like what she saw.

Gabi shifted, sat up a little straighter. ‘So… What are you going to do?’

‘I don’t know,’ Anna replied slowly, and she really didn’t. She’d done it all. Grief counselling? Tick. Self-help books and support groups? Tick. Nothing seemed to work. ‘I wish I did.’

Gabi didn’t say anything; she just smiled.

‘What?’ Anna said, slightly scared of the answer to her question.

‘How about salsa?’

‘Really?’ she replied, hoping that Gabi was just pulling her leg. The determined pair of eyes that sat above the troublesome smirk said otherwise.

‘Really. If you go to salsa, we won’t talk about New Year’s Eve again.’

Anna hesitated. Gabi was still sitting with her arms folded, watching her. Waiting. Anna swallowed.

‘It will be fun,’ Gabi added, without smiling this time.

‘You really think I need to—’

‘Yes. I do.’ Gabi’s answer was hard, but her eyes gave her away. Behind the determined stare, Anna could detect quiet pleading. Gabi was worried about her. Really worried. That was why she was clinging on to this idea as if it was a lifeline. It wasn’t about the dancing or the classes. Her friend was just desperate to know there was hope, that Anna could find some way to be happy again.

She nodded. ‘Okay.’ She’d do just about anything for Gabi. Even salsa.

Gabi jumped off the armchair, squealing, and ran across and dived on Anna, wrapping her in a hug. ‘I will ask Jeremy about—’

Anna pushed Gabi back enough to look her in the face without going cross-eyed. ‘Hold on! No one said anything about Jeremy!’

Gabi tipped her head to one side and gave Anna an exasperated look. ‘But Jeremy is very nice – and very hot!’

‘You go salsa dancing with him then!’

‘No one is asking you to marry him. It’s just dancing. Think of him as… What is the word? Training wheels! You can take them off when you are ready for more.’

Anna folded her arms. ‘I said yes to salsa, not to Jeremy. And if you’re going to make me salsa at all, then you are going to be my partner.’

‘Oh, yes?’ Gabi held out her hands and beckoned to Anna with her fingertips. ‘Show me!’

Reluctantly, Anna got off the sofa and joined her friend. Gabi wouldn’t let her sit back down until they’d tried a few steps of what seemed like salsa, but it all got out of hand when Gabi tried to dip Anna and lost her balance. They ended up on the floor in a heap, giggling.

‘It’s good to hear you laugh,’ Gabi said.

Anna sighed. ‘I know.’

They pushed themselves onto all fours and then crawled back onto the sofa. ‘I’m going to get glasses,’ Gabi said, nodding at the wine. ‘Do you want to sleep here tonight?’

Anna crawled over to Gabi’s end of the sofa and gave her a big, fat, squishy kiss on the cheek. ‘I love you, you know that?’

Gabi gave her a squeeze back, then shoved her off so she could stand up. ‘I know. It’s hard not to.’

Anna gratefully accepted the large glass of red wine Gabi handed her a minute or so later, and the duvet and pillows that were thrown at her when they’d polished the bottle off so she could nest down on the sofa. Gabi even produced a pair of freshly laundered, brushed cotton pyjamas for Anna to wear.

‘Thank you,’ Anna said as she took them and held them to her chest.

‘They are too small for me now. You can have them if you want.’

‘Not for the pyjamas, you dafty – although they’re lovely – I meant for everything.’

‘I just want you to be happy.’

Anna nodded. She knew that. But it was safer not to reply in words, because she also knew that what Gabi wished for her just wasn’t possible. There was a difference between having a quick giggle about falling over your best friend’s two left feet and being truly content and peaceful. Anna wasn’t convinced she could ever feel that way again. How was it possible when a huge piece of herself was missing, and always would be?

ANNA RETURNED HOME the following morning and headed straight for the shower, leaving her clothes in a heap on the bathroom floor. It was her first day back at work after the Christmas holidays, and she didn’t want to be late, even if it wasn’t the most thrilling job in the world.

Before Spencer had died, they’d worked together, but it hadn’t always been that way. He’d left university with a degree in Computer Science and, after a few false starts, had ended up working for a medium-sized video game developer. However, as the popularity of smartphones had risen, Spencer had become obsessed with creating a game app that would go viral. He’d tried all sorts of different things, from racing cars to flying sheep or bubbles that needed popping. He’d earned enough from a couple of them to go part-time, but he’d never quite come up with the big success he’d been looking for.

The problem was that Spencer was a mass of overflowing energy, and he struggled with focusing on one task for a consistent length of time. This became more apparent when he worked whole days at home with no structure. Anna had just accepted that was who Spencer was, but it had frustrated him no end.

He’d begun a search to find a time-management method that worked for his butterfly brain, but nothing had seemed to stick until he’d stumbled upon the concept of ‘block scheduling’, which gave him the structure he needed without pinning him down too hard. However, the only relevant app he could find was not only a bit basic but hot pink. Spencer had ranted at length about that – who on earth made their app all pink with no option to change the colour scheme? Anna had finally got fed up and told him to stop moaning and start creating an app of his own. He had the skills to do so, after all.

And Spencer had done just that. He’d teamed up with a couple of other guys he’d known at uni, and together they’d built ‘BlockTime’, a stylish, intuitive time-management app that (a) wasn’t hot pink and (b) integrated seamlessly with existing calendars, to-do lists and other apps. And, thanks to Spencer’s attempts to create the next viral game, it was more than a little addictive to use. It had taken time, but eventually it had grown in popularity.

Anna had quit her job as an HR assistant manager and had gone to work for the three guys. At first, she’d just done the admin and kept the books, but as time had gone on, she’d become involved in the design side. She had an eye for that kind of thing, it turned out, and while the ‘boys’ had plenty of innovative ideas, sometimes they weren’t always very practical. They’d needed someone to keep them grounded, to make sure the app was the kind of thing people would find easy to use, as well as being cool and full of technical wizardry. She’d loved working alongside Spencer, seeing him do what he was good at. When the money had finally started arriving, they hadn’t been rich, but they’d been comfortable.

She’d taken time off after he died, of course. But two months had turned into three, and then three into six. Eventually, she’d had to admit that she just couldn’t face going back into the office. Vijay and Rhys, the other directors, had understood. She’d inherited Spencer’s share in the business and received a monthly cut from that, but other than that she left them to it. At least one thing she didn’t have to worry about as a widow was money.

But she’d needed something to fill her days, so she’d applied for an admin job at a successful family-run plumbing business, and she’d now been there more than two years. What with it being winter, pipes freezing and boilers giving out, there was likely to be a lot of paperwork to catch up on after the Christmas break. Today was not the day to be late.

When she emerged from the shower, pink and scrubbed, she wrapped a towel around herself and hurried out onto the landing, but then she hesitated. The next logical place to go was the bedroom. She needed fresh clothes. But she hadn’t been in there since she’d fled the house the day before.

Stop being daft, she lectured herself. There’s nothing to be frightened of.

Before she could talk herself out of it, she walked into her bedroom. Spencer had very helpfully pointed out that one of her weaknesses was bottling everything up until she reached boiling point and then, when it exploded out of her, she did and said bizarre things. Was it too much of a stretch to think that she’d hear bizarre things as well?

She walked towards the wardrobe, slowly, quietly, almost as if she was creeping up on it, and then she hooked her fingers around the edge of the half-open door and pulled. Her phone glinted at her from the floor, looking so ordinary, so innocent. She bent down and picked it up.

There. That hadn’t been so hard, had it?

And because it hadn’t been hard, because it all felt a bit surreal, like something that had happened in a dream, she pressed her thumb to the wake-up button and brought the display to life.

She pulled up her phone history. There, near the top of the list, was a call made at exactly midnight on New Year’s Eve. She became aware of a woolly, tangled feeling in her stomach, a strange tightness in her chest. The evidence was there. She’d really dialled. She’d really said, ‘I love you’.

The real question was: what had she heard in the silence that had followed? Nothing? Something? Her imagination going wild?

It had to be that.

She couldn’t entertain anything else. She couldn’t let herself hope and then let those hopes be dashed again. As low and lifeless as she felt at the moment, it was nothing compared to the first few months after Spencer’s death. She didn’t want to go hurtling back to that dark place.

Which meant what she did next was important. She was on a threshold. A knife edge. And there was only one possible direction she could let herself fall.

She lifted her thumb and swiped, deleting the log of just that one call. There. Gone. It had never happened.

Chapter Seven

THE FEBRUARY NIGHT air was cool on Anna’s skin as she walked towards home. She’d known that coming out tonight was going to be a mistake, but she’d come anyway, only to be proven right. Instead of feeling buoyant and energized as Gabi had promised, she felt exhausted and flat.

She and Gabi had been going to salsa classes for six weeks now, although, much to Gabi’s annoyance, Anna had insisted on going to the Tuesday night class instead of the Wednesday night one she knew Jeremy attended. However, once a month, the salsa school held a ‘party’, an opportunity for students from both classes to mingle and practise their moves in a more informal atmosphere.

Anna had cried off the January salsa party, but Gabi had been determined that neither of them were missing the February one, especially as it had been scheduled to coincide with Valentine’s Day. It didn’t take a genius to understand there were certain milestone days every year Anna struggled with. She had done her best to reassure Gabi she’d have a much better evening staying home, out of the way of ‘loved up’ couples, and starting the dark drama series that was next on her ‘to watch’ list, but Gabi hadn’t taken no for an answer, so off to the Civic Centre they’d trotted.

Gabi’s night had gone well – she’d snagged the attention of Lee, the guy she’d had a crush on since the previous party – but Anna’s night had been… Well, not what she’d expected.

Jeremy had been there. She’d been prepared for that. He’d asked her to dance. She’d expected that too. He’d been charming, making her laugh about carrying on with salsa instead of joining his sister in her latest fitness craze (Burlesquercise), but when the song had finished, he hadn’t lingered. In fact, he’d gone straight off and danced with another woman. Anna had got the distinct impression he was just being chivalrous, that she was just one in a long list of wallflowers he’d decided needed rescuing. For some reason that had irritated her.

But what had she been expecting? That with all her joie de vivre and sparkling conversation, a catch like Jeremy had been pining away for her for the last six weeks? That he’d come along that night in the hope of seeing her?

It was fine. She didn’t want him to want her. And she certainly didn’t want him, nice as he was. However, despite all her breezy inner protestations, as she’d watched him execute moves far above her skill level with a girl with a very swooshy ponytail, she’d been aware of a door slamming shut inside herself. A door she hadn’t even known had been open.

That was the moment she’d decided to make her excuses to Gabi and head home.

When Anna walked back inside her house, it seemed empty, even though all her possessions were still exactly where she’d left them. Nothing was missing. Except, maybe, the card that should have been on her mantelpiece, the flowers that should have been in the vase on the dining table. There was no Valentine’s fizz in the fridge, and there would be no laughter and warmth between the sheets of her bed when she finally crawled into it later on.

She missed him so much.

Most of all, she missed his touch. Not just the sex – that would be easy to get, if she were so inclined, a physical need to be met like hunger or thirst – but she missed those little moments of contact that only came with familiarity and intimacy. She missed having someone to snuggle up with on the sofa. Someone to kiss her goodbye in the mornings. Someone to fall asleep on during a train journey home after a night out in London. All seemingly tiny, inconsequential things. Except they weren’t. It had taken losing them to make her realize how essential they were.

Anna tried to ignore the feeling that she was an empty shell, nothing else inside her but this ache for something she couldn’t have. She tried to distract herself by pottering around, slipping off her shoes, hanging up her coat, putting the kettle on to make herself a cup of herbal tea she didn’t really want. But the void inside just throbbed.

Eventually, she turned on a single lamp in the living room and sat down in the corner of her sofa. It was so tidy, so neat. That was Anna’s natural state. She found it easy to put things away, to keep things ordered, but it wasn’t how their home had been when Spencer had been alive.

She reached over to the coffee table and pulled the newspaper out from the shelf underneath, then flapped the pages open and messed them around a bit, before crumpling a section up and letting it slide onto the floor. That was how he’d always left it. It had driven her mad, but now she almost missed the socks down the side of the sofa cushions and the boxers that only made it halfway into the linen basket.

She sank back into the sofa and sighed. Would it ever stop, this feeling? Wasn’t time supposed to heal all wounds? In her opinion, Time was doing a pretty crappy job. Buck up, Time! Sort yourself out. After all, it kept marching her steadily away from the last moment she’d seen Spencer living and breathing, whether she wanted it to or not. Surely it owed her a little something in return?

She tucked her legs up under herself and reached for her phone. This was a bad idea, but it had been a difficult night to get through; she was going to allow herself one small concession, one tiny weakness.

She pulled up her messages, found Spencer’s name, then scrolled back to 14 February three years earlier. He’d died a little over a month later, but on that Valentine’s Day Spencer had sent her a series of funny little text messages, crammed with emoticons and saucy suggestions about how they should spend the evening together when he got home.

Anna smiled as she reread them, revelling in not just the words but the memories of that night, memories that only two people in this world had been party to, and now she was the sole keeper of. It would be wrong to let them fade and die.

But reading it back, remembering it all, was like picking at a scab. It started with that feeling, that delicious temptation, knowing there was something you wanted to do but shouldn’t. Oh, and then the moment came when you let your self-control crash and gave in to it. Bliss. Relief. Everything focused on that moment of instant gratification.

But it didn’t stay that way for long. The wound was open again, and it began to sting and seep. There was a price to be paid for that split-second of euphoria, and Anna paid it in full as she stared at the bright screen of her mobile, full of Spencer’s personality captured in letters and stupid little cartoon faces, and the ache deepened until it was almost unbearable.

But then an idea crept into her head, a magnetic tug pulling her to a destination she didn’t want to visit. To take her mind off it, she opened up the photos app on her phone and began scrolling back through the images of them together, lingering on them the way she’d wanted to at her mother-in-law’s the previous Sunday (it had been secondary school pictures that day: toothy smiles, trophies and too-big blazers), but eventually she reached the earliest ones, and as many times as she tried to swipe down to reveal more, the pictures bounced back up to the top of the screen, stubbornly refusing to do as she asked.

And the tugging towards that bad idea, that black hole, was still there in the background, whispering to her, hypnotizing her to the point where she numbly opened her contacts and found the favourites. Spencer’s name was at the top. She stared at it.

You said you wouldn’t do this again, that sensible little voice in her head whispered. You promised yourself that Valentine’s Day would be different from New Year’s Eve, but her finger pressed the screen while the inner voice was still talking, and the phone began dialling his number. Even though her heart was beating double-time, due to the memory of what had happened last time she’d done this, she held the phone up to her ear.

The ringing on the other end of the line stopped and she held her breath, waiting for what came next. However, instead of Spencer’s message, she heard a generic robotic voice instructing her to wait and speak after the tone.

How the heck had that happened? Had she been in such a flap last time that she’d managed to press the wrong button and delete his voicemail greeting? No, that wasn’t right. You could do that to your own message but not to someone else’s. It didn’t make sense.

She pressed the end call button in frustration. What had just happened? Had it been a wrong number? Seconds ticked by as she glared at her phone screen, holding her breath, and then she dialled again. This time there was no message at all.

The call connected.

‘Hello?’

Anna froze.

Was that him? It had only been one word. She couldn’t tell! She couldn’t think! Once upon a time, she’d been able to tell his voice from anyone else’s, and it cut her to the core that she’d lost that treasured skill and hadn’t even realized it.

‘Spencer?’ she said in a croaky voice. ‘Is that you? Please let it be you.’ She started to cry. ‘I have so much I want to say…’

For a long time, there was nothing but silence. No voice. Not even the sound of someone breathing – which, in a rather morbid way, made sense – but she felt a presence. Someone was there. Someone was listening.

And so she started to speak. She began to say everything that had been boiling up inside her for two years, ten months and twenty-two days.

‘Spencer, it’s me…’ She broke off, unable to carry on because her throat was so tight, and she had to concentrate on getting the next words out. ‘I love you, Spencer. I know you always laughed at the idea of soul mates, but you were mine. You are mine. And I miss you so much… Sometimes, I feel as if I’m never going to feel normal again. Strike that, because I feel that way all the time. And how could I go back to normal without you, anyway? I’m not sure how I go on living and breathing without you as it is.’

A sudden wave of emotion hit her. Not something crashing over her from the outside, but something rising up from within.

‘And I’m angry with you for that! I’m cross that you left me here alone, like it’s some big joke. Like you’re going to jump out from behind a corner and shout: “Only kidding!” But it’s not funny anymore, Spencer! It’s just not funny. So stop it, you hear me? Stop it. Because I want you back.’ She hiccupped in a breath and then let out a sob. Her voice dropped to a whisper. ‘Please come back.’

No reply.

Gluey tears had collected under her lashes and she wiped them away with her hands. ‘Please talk to me.’ She waited. Seconds ground past. Still there was no response on the other end of the line, but she could feel him there. She really could.

‘Spencer?’ she eventually said. It felt as if she was tiptoeing beyond the edges of life, of what was real. Maybe the rules were different there. Maybe she shouldn’t take some things for granted. ‘Can you hear me? Do you even remember me? It’s Anna…’

Please, she whispered silently, not knowing if she was appealing to Spencer or God, or the night around her. Please, let there be someone there. I feel so alone.

She waited for him to say her name, waited for him to say it in that soft, sexy way he always had when he’d picked up one of her calls, as if he had a special smile just for her. Anna, he’d say, and he’d load that one word with everything he felt for her. He wouldn’t have even needed to tell her he loved her each day, even though he always had. Just hearing her name on his lips would have been enough.

And then it happened. What she’d been waiting for happened.

‘Anna?’

Chapter Eight

ANNA.

He’d said her name, but it wasn’t soft and warm and full of smiles. Just a word repeated because it made no sense to the person speaking it. Anna felt as if someone had tipped a bucket of ice water over her head.

Oh, my God! What am I doing?

She ended the call, dropped the phone, then sprang off the sofa and stood at the opposite side of the room, trembling. She turned so she didn’t have to look at the screen and found herself facing the small sideboard. She flung one of the doors open to reveal several dusty bottles of whisky. Spencer’s whisky. She pulled out a tumbler and reached for a bottle, bypassing the smooth Highland Park for the Lagavulin. She needed earthy, peaty tones and a fire in the back of her throat. She half-filled the glass, knocked it back in one go, then shuddered.

By the time she was at the bottom of her second glass, she wasn’t quite as mortified as she had been half an hour earlier. In fact, she was starting to feel much more philosophical about the whole thing. So much so, that she reached over, picked up her phone and dialled the number again.

There was no mechanical voicemail message, just a hesitant silence on the other end of the line.

‘I’m sorry. I know…’ she said, hoping the edges of the words weren’t blurring into each other too much. And then, when all that came back was a soft grunt, she added, ‘I know you’re not him… That you’re not Spencer…’ She broke off again to cough back a sob as the truth of that realization hit her a second time, as ridiculous as it was to have even considered it in the first place. ‘I just wanted to say that I’m sorry. For phoning in the middle of the night – twice now! – and rambling on like I’ve become unhinged.’

Another soft grunt. But there might have been the merest smidge of a smile behind this one.

‘I’m not unhinged. I’m just… Just…’

There was a heavy masculine sigh.

‘I don’t know what I am,’ she ended weakly.

For a few seconds it was very quiet, and Anna was half-expecting to hear it deaden, for that silence, that gap in a conversation when no one says anything, to become the blankness of no one else being there at all, but then she heard him take a breath, readying himself to speak. ‘You haven’t lost your mind,’ he said.

His voice was rich and warm and certain. Anna was tempted to believe him, even though she wasn’t sure it was the truth. Reality had been a hazy concept for a long time now. ‘How do you know? After all, I’m talking to a stranger in the middle of the night.’

‘Life… isn’t always easy,’ he replied slowly. It seemed as if he was picking his words carefully, not because he didn’t have the conversational skills, quite the reverse. She had a feeling that this man was always careful with his words, always weighed them and used them sparingly. ‘Things happen… Things you couldn’t ever have predicted. And when they do, it can throw you, turn you upside down and your life takes a very different path.’

Anna held her breath. How did he know? Was there something strange and supernatural going on here after all? It seemed as if he’d peered inside her skull and recited back to her all the things she was thinking and feeling but could never tell anyone.

‘And when life changes suddenly and unexpectedly,’ he continued, ‘there’s a grieving of what was and what never can be again. I would call that being human.’

That all sounded very logical, which was reassuring. He could just be telling her what she wanted to hear, of course, to get the hysterical woman off the phone, but even so, his words had the weight of truth about them. Of experience.

‘Are you human?’ she wanted to ask, but she’d already subjected this poor man to a hefty dollop of her stupidity; he probably didn’t need more. She swallowed the question and took a different tack. ‘Thank you,’ she whispered. ‘And sorry… I won’t ring again.’ And then, because it seemed rude not to, she added, ‘Goodnight.’

A pause, as if he was considering her words, as simple as they had been. ‘Goodnight… Anna.’

And then he was gone, cut off by the pad of her thumb on the glass of her phone screen. Goodnight, Anna. There had been no smile in that voice just for her. But there had been something. Something she couldn’t quite put her finger on.

Didn’t matter, though, she thought as she stood up, turned off the living room light and headed up the stairs. She wouldn’t be dialling that number ever again.

Chapter Nine

ANNA KEPT HER promise to herself – she didn’t call Spencer’s number again. Or, what turned out to be Spencer’s old number. She did, however, call the mobile phone provider and, after twenty minutes on hold and being rerouted through three different departments, finally the mystery was solved.

She’d been paying for Spencer’s mobile with a joint credit card she no longer used except for that bill. The account was still active, but the card had expired last September. She’d found an urgent email buried under five hundred other unopened messages in her inbox, warning her Spencer’s account would be closed in sixty days if a new payment source was not provided. When that hadn’t happened, his number had been reassigned.

It was her fault that tiny but vital connection to Spencer had been lost. Nothing spooky or supernatural. No act of God or fate or whatever it was that was laughing at her from above the clouds as it toyed with her life. Her own stupid fault. She wished she could rewind time and go back and read the buried email alert before it was too late, to get her lethargic backside into gear and call the phone company.

But she supposed if she’d had the power to do that, she’d have skipped over those inconsequential things and would have gone back to the day Spencer had died. Instead of yelling down at him to get a two-pint carton of milk when he went to the shop, she would have run down the stairs, stopped him as he was opening the door, pinned him against the wall and kissed him senseless. Thirty seconds was all it would have taken, and then that drunk driver would have been further down the road or all the way around the corner. None of this would have happened and she wouldn’t be living this nightmare.

That thought plagued her more and more as the next few weeks ticked past, leading up to 23 March, the third anniversary of his death. The Barry family had forgone their scheduled Sunday lunch two days earlier and were meeting up to mark the occasion, so Anna had taken the day off work. About eleven in the morning she climbed into her car and headed out of London.

She glanced up at the sky as the houses and shops melted into woods and farmland. It was grey and moody, threatening rain. Disappointing, but fitting. She had mixed feelings about the day ahead. The last two years, she’d met up with Spencer’s family and they’d all just assumed they would do the same today, but now she was thinking about it, she wondered if she’d have been better off spending the day on her own. A day to be quiet and reflect might have been just what she needed.

She sighed. It was too late to change plans now, anyhow. It would be insensitive – if not downright rude – to call and say she wasn’t coming.

Her phone was sitting in a mount on the dashboard and she glanced at it. What she really wanted to do was call her mum and get some emotional support before she arrived at her destination. It would be early in Nova Scotia – not long past breakfast time – and her mother might well be up and driving to work in the nearby city of Halifax.

But Anna had to walk a fine line with her parents. It might be different if they didn’t live on another continent, but they did, and she had to deal with that. Even though it had been three years, she knew they’d drop everything to come and visit if they felt she was struggling, but that just didn’t seem fair. They had their own lives, and she didn’t want her mother to jeopardize a job she adored.

In the end, she gave in and made the call. She could edit what she said, after all, and skirt around the really dark stuff that went on in her head, as she usually did.

‘Hello, darling,’ her mum said, and Anna could hear the dull rumble of traffic in the background. ‘I suspected I might hear from you this morning, but I was going to call later if I didn’t.’ She sighed. ‘I’ve been thinking a lot about Spencer myself the last few days. You know how much your father and I adored him. I can hardly believe it’s been three years…’

Anna sucked in a breath and blinked furiously, caught off guard by her mother’s words.

‘How are you doing?’ her mum asked softly.

‘I’m… managing,’ Anna lied, but then compensated with a bit of truth. ‘But I’m not really looking forward to today.’

‘Another trip to the crematorium and one of Gayle’s buffets?’

Anna grimaced. ‘No, thank goodness. I couldn’t have faced sandwiches and finger food again this year. Maybe that’s just as well. I’m starting to find going to Gayle and Richard’s a little… I don’t know… claustrophobic.’

‘Really? How so?’

Anna frowned as she concentrated on overtaking a car that was going half the speed of all the other traffic. ‘I’m not sure how to put it into words. You know how important it is to me to keep that connection with Spencer’s family, but sometimes I find Gayle a little bit distant. Maybe it’s just me…’ She trailed off to consider this. She had been out of sorts, ever since New Year’s Eve. That night, that call, had done it. Maybe she was just being oversensitive?

‘I get what you’re saying about Gayle,’ her mum said. ‘She’s always struck me as a little… structured.’

Anna chuckled softly. That was certainly one word for it.

‘I thought she was that type from the first time we all had dinner together, but my heart really went out to her after Spencer passed away.’ She paused for a moment and sighed. ‘I can’t even imagine how I’d react if I lost you, and I couldn’t judge her if she was being a bit, well, controlling, in those months after he died. People deal with things in their own unique ways.’

‘Yes,’ Anna replied thoughtfully as she turned onto the A21 and headed towards the coast. ‘Being in control… I suppose that is Gayle’s way of dealing with things. She likes her routines, her rituals.’ But so did Anna, so maybe she shouldn’t judge her mother-in-law for that. ‘Anyway, no mini Scotch eggs and fondant fancies today, thank goodness. She suggested doing something different.’

‘Gayle did? You do surprise me! But maybe it’s healthy that she’s decided to plan something different this year. It shows that perhaps she’s beginning to move on.’

‘Yes,’ Anna replied. She supposed that made sense, even though she didn’t think she’d seen much evidence of that in their fortnightly lunches, but maybe she should give Gayle the benefit of the doubt? She hadn’t always been quite this structured, after all. In the years before Spencer had died, she’d always been reserved, a little bit starchy, but she’d seemed softer, more ready to show her emotions. Anna had always thought she’d got on fine with her mother-in-law.

‘So, what are you doing today instead?’ her mum asked.

Anna brightened. ‘We’re going to Camber Sands,’ she said, smiling to herself.

‘In March?’

Anna laughed. ‘Yes, in March.’ She didn’t mind what month it was. ‘It was one of Spencer’s favourite places. The Barrys used to rent a cottage right on the beach almost every year when he was a kid. His dog, Lewis, used to love it there, ran around like an idiot on the sand all day long. We rented a place there for our first anniversary, a little wooden bungalow on the road just behind the dunes. Do you remember? The website pictures made it look like shabby chic, but it turned out to be just plain shabby.’

Her mother laughed. ‘Oh, yes! Didn’t the electricity cut out?’

‘The first time we tried to boil the kettle. We had to light candles and wait until the owner came the next morning to show us how to deal with the temperamental fuse box.’

She and Spencer hadn’t cared. Not only had the candlelight made everything more romantic, but Anna had been secretly pleased. They’d never forget that anniversary now. They had another anecdote to file away under ‘Anna and Spencer’s marriage’, one they’d share with their friends, and years later with their children and then their grandchildren when they took them to the beach. This was gold in the treasure chest of her soul.

But now Spencer was gone, those shiny moments she’d collected and cherished were all she had left. Only sometimes they felt like arrows in her heart instead of riches. Sometimes they were both at the same time. It was all very confusing.

Her mother must have guessed her thoughts, because she said, ‘I know it’s hard, darling. Especially as you didn’t have a proper chance to say goodbye to Spencer…’

Anna’s breath hitched and tears stung the backs of her eyes.

‘But maybe today will be a good day to try and do that? Not forget him, of course, but find a way to, you know…’

Anna’s shoulders slumped, and she mouthed the next words along with her mother: ‘move on.’

Her mother was almost as bad as Gabi, suggesting projects to fire her passion, different support groups and self-help books.

‘I suppose so,’ she said. It was just that nothing seemed to excite her anymore, nothing seemed to light her passion. It was very hard to move forwards when you felt like a flat tyre.

‘Listen… I’m just pulling into the hotel car park, so I’ve got to go, darling, but I want you to know I’ll be thinking of you all day. Call me again if you need me.’

‘I will,’ Anna said hoarsely. ‘Thank you, Mum.’

‘Nonsense. It’s what I’m here for.’

‘I know. But I appreciate it anyway.’ Anna heard her mother’s engine cut out. ‘I’d better let you go… Love you, Mum.’

‘Love you too…’ And then her mother was gone.

Anna concentrated on the road again, chewing over what her mother had said. It made her think of that stupid phone call on New Year’s Eve. That’s what she’d been hoping for, she realized now – a chance to talk to Spencer, to say all those things she wished she’d said to him but never had. And then that hope had been snatched away again when she’d realized it was just her imagination conjuring up things she wanted to be true.

And she was sad it wasn’t true, even if it had been a ridiculous idea. Even if it had been just that one time, it might have been enough. A chance to say a proper goodbye. Their last goodbye. Because she needed to do that. Or at least start to do that. Her mother and Gabi were right. She needed to learn to live without Spencer, no matter how nonsensical the idea seemed.

As she drove, she pictured herself standing on the dunes at Camber Sands, looking out across a beautifully ruffled sea, the wind rustling the long, waxy grass, the pale sun low in a slate-blue sky. She imagined herself breathing out. That was all she was asking for today. Not complete peace and healing. Just some space to close her eyes, think of Spencer, and breathe out. All the way.

Chapter Ten

ANNA PULLED INTO a near-deserted car park an hour or so later. She turned off her engine and opened the car door, glimpsing flat grey sea between the Marina Café, public toilets and other low buildings. The moment her head rose above the level of the open door, the wind whipped her hair in front of her face. She left it there, too busy thinking about the last moments of the journey itself to bother pushing it out of the way.

On the drive down the narrow, dead-end road that led to the beach, she’d passed her and Spencer’s bungalow, and even though it had been remodelled and extended, she’d recognized it straight away.

This had been a good choice for today. The whole place was full of memories of Spencer, even this car park nestled in a gap in the dunes, with its ever-present drifts of sand that curled and swirled in the breeze. In her mind, she could see him at the pay-and-display meter, swearing colourfully as it refused his 50-pence piece over and over. And there near the café was the sandy slope he’d carried her up from the beach because she’d just dried her feet off from paddling and hadn’t wanted to get them gritty again.

She sighed. She couldn’t wait to just start wandering around, letting those happier moments come back to her. She needed them.

She turned as another vehicle arrived – Gayle and Richard’s ancient but pristine Rover, with Scott and Teresa in the back. It pulled into a space on the opposite side of the car park, near the café. Anna locked her car and began to walk in that direction.

Gayle emerged from the Rover in a smart black dress with matching jacket, her hairdo defying the blustery weather – how did she manage that? Shellac? – and supervised with military efficiency as Richard removed a canvas shopper from the boot and donned wellingtons.

‘Hi,’ Anna said as she strolled over.

‘Oh, hello,’ Gayle said, smiling slightly. ‘You’re here.’ And then she took in Anna’s jeans, dark-green jumper and her usual black coat. Her eyebrows lifted an infinitesimal amount. Anna had gone for comfort over style, but even if she’d decided to dress more smartly, she wouldn’t have chosen all black for today. She didn’t want to dress up like it was his funeral all over again.

The others emerged from the car and greeted her, all three of them giving her a hug and kissing her on the cheek. Richard and Scott wore dark suits, and Teresa a demure charcoal dress similar to their mother-in-law’s. None of them looked as if they were ready for a day at the beach. Had someone forgotten to give Anna the memo? What was the deal here, anyway?

‘Have you got the bag, Richard?’ Gayle asked.

‘Roger that,’ Richard replied, holding it slightly higher for his wife’s inspection.

She nodded, then turned and set off in the direction of dunes that rose from the far edge of the car park, undeterred by her unsuitable footwear. ‘Right,’ she said. ‘Come on. First stop is “our” picnic spot in the dunes.’

Oh, Anna thought. There was a plan. Of course there was. One, obviously, that she’d had no part in putting together and hadn’t been consulted about. Well, Anna had a plan of her own, one that was just as important. She stood taller and pulled her coat tightly around herself. ‘Actually… Gayle?’ she called out.

Gayle turned around, her expression a mixture of bafflement and irritation.

‘Before we head off, could we just backtrack to the bungalow – the little yellow one – along the road? It’s just that Spencer and I—’

‘Maybe later,’ Gayle said, turning and continuing in the direction she’d been going, and then added over her shoulder: ‘If we’ve got time… We don’t want supper this evening to be too late, do we?’

‘Supper?’ Anna echoed.

‘Back at our house. I’ve got sandwiches and vol au vents ready. Richard sent you an email about it, remember?’

Anna’s mouth fell open, but she had nothing to say. She did remember getting an email, but to be honest, she’d just skimmed it for where and when to meet. Richard had a tendency to waffle on somewhat.

Maybe she couldn’t be cross about that, but she was more than a little irritated at being dismissed and overruled. Gayle seemed to be forgetting that this day was for all of them to remember Spencer, not just her. Anna was just trying to work out how to say that without seeming too bitchy, when what her mother had said to her on the phone came back to her. Being in control was Gayle’s way of coping. This wasn’t personal, she had to remember that.

Anna stood there for a moment, irritation and compassion warring for the upper hand inside her, then her shoulders sagged. Okay, despite being royally ticked off by Gayle’s imperious attitude, she’d hold fire for now. But make no mistake, she’d be visiting that yellow bungalow later on that afternoon, come hell or high water, and Gayle would just have to deal with it.

Anna blew out a breath that did little to calm her jagged emotions, dug her fists into her pockets, and trailed behind the tight-knit group heading up the large dune that constantly threatened to swallow up the eastern boundary of the car park.

ANNA MOVED THROUGH the next hour or so as if she was outside herself, as if she were watching a film of the proceedings and the camera had pulled back for a long shot. It was the only way she could cope. Gayle had cast herself as chief mourner, even though every single person there ached just as hard as she did. Anna was relegated to loyal sidekick, having to stand next to Gayle as she gave a speech at the family’s favourite picnic spot, as they wrote messages to Spencer on scraps of paper, then rolled them up and stuck them in a bottle, which was then buried in the sand at a location Gayle had chosen.

Anna would have liked a little more than the two minutes Gayle had allotted to work out what she’d wanted to write because when she’d stared at the blank strip of faux parchment (Gayle never did anything by halves), she just couldn’t make her brain work. She’d kept staring at it up until the last ten seconds, and then she’d scribbled ‘I love you’ and stuffed the paper in the bottle. Heartfelt. True. But not very eloquent. Also, not the ‘goodbye’ she’d been revving up to. How could she rush that?

And then they were hurried on to the next place of significance to everyone but Anna and Teresa, now almost six months pregnant, who was waddling up and down the dunes without a squeak of protest. It would make Anna look bad if she said anything.

She tuned out her mother-in-law’s voice, let it become part of the background noise, like the squawking of the seagulls, as she tried to find that still place in her heart where she could talk to Spencer, tell him what she’d wanted to say today. She’d just about gained the right amount of focus to start when Gayle clapped her hands and announced, ‘Well, I think it’s time we got to the most important part of the afternoon, the reason we chose to come here this year… Richard, have you got the bag?’

Richard, who’d hardly said a word since they’d arrived, nodded. Anna’s attention was drawn once again to the canvas shopper he was carrying. He’d been lugging it around all over the dunes. What exactly was inside it?

He held the bag up to Gayle and she reached in and reverently pulled out a small pewter urn. The kind with a lid. The kind used for…

But, no. That couldn’t be right.

‘We’ll walk out to the shore now the tide’s out,’ Gayle said, ‘and then Richard and Scott can scatter the ashes in the sea.’

Ashes?

She can’t have just said that, Anna thought, even though the urn in Gayle’s grip was evidence to the contrary, but she hardly had time to process that before Gayle added, ‘We’re all agreed this is the right place?’ There were murmurs and nods of agreement as Gayle looked from person to person. ‘This is where he would have chosen if it had been up to him.’ And then she shifted her gaze to Anna.

‘Ashes?’ Anna echoed weakly. It was the only word going around her head at that moment.

Gayle nodded.

‘Spencer’s ashes?’

Teresa shot a nervous look at her mother-in-law and then her husband. Scott was busy studying an abandoned plastic spade half-buried in the sand and didn’t seem inclined to glance up.

Gayle stood a little straighter. ‘Yes.’

‘But Spencer’s ashes are in the Garden of Remembrance at the crematorium!’

Gayle’s stare didn’t waver. ‘Your half of them are. Our half are here…’ She patted the urn in her hands gently. ‘And we’re going to scatter them in my son’s happy place, the place where he had most joy.’

Their half?

Anna stood open-mouthed as the rest of the family headed down the side of the dune that led to the beach. They were carrying a piece of her husband with them. A piece that she’d never known existed!

She dug back in her memory to that foggy time after Spencer’s accident, a period when she’d hardly been functioning. Richard and Scott had stepped in and done a lot of what had been needed: meeting with the funeral directors, dealing with probate. It was possible that they could have kept half of the ashes for themselves without telling her, but why would they do that? Why hide it from her?

But maybe they had consulted her. They could have asked if it was a good idea to have circus performers and pink-spotted elephants at the funeral, and she probably would have nodded and said, ‘Fine… Whatever you want…’

The rest of the group had descended the far side of the dune and were already out of sight. Anna started to run after them, but now the sand had been disturbed, the top layer kept sliding over the layer underneath, taking her with it. It was like running up a ‘down’ escalator. She forced herself to stand still for a moment, caught her breath, then chose a different path and planted purposeful feet, one in front of the other, until she made it to the top.

When she crested the dune, she found Teresa waiting for her and they fell into step together, eyes fixed on the other three members of the Barry family, who were now some distance away. Camber Sands was one of those shallow beaches perfect for families on summer holidays, because at low tide the sea retreated almost to the horizon, leaving pools of seawater to be warmed by the sun for children to paddle in. On a day like today, though, it was a long and blustery walk to the waves.

‘You didn’t know?’ Teresa asked as they trailed behind the others.

Anna shook her head.

‘Cow,’ Teresa muttered.

Anna shot her a surprised look. She’d never once seen or heard any hint that her sister-in-law did anything but toe the party line, but the response resonated with her. It resonated quite a lot, actually.

Gayle was being a cow today, and Anna had put up with all of it, ignoring all the little digs and snubs, because she was trying to be the daughter-in-law Spencer would want her to be – kind and supportive, making allowances for the other woman’s pain – but it had become startlingly clear in the last half hour just how much of a one-way street that was.

Spencer had adored his mum, but he hadn’t been blind to her faults, and if there was one thing he’d prefer his wife to be, rather than a doting daughter-in-law, it was someone who had a backbone. He’d always encouraged her to stand up for herself, to be more assertive.

Spurred on by that thought, she marched towards the small cluster of people where the shallow beach met the waves. The furnace of her rage roared brighter with every step. Teresa plodded along behind her, doing her best to keep up.

Anna’s first urge was to stride up to Gayle and let rip, but then she thought about how both Spencer and Gabi had always said that she bottled everything up until she couldn’t hold it in any longer and then it all came pouring out in an unintelligible eruption, ‘unintelligible’ being the operative word. She couldn’t have that. She needed Gayle to get this, to understand that it was not okay to have excluded her from today’s plans so completely.

When she reached her in-laws, Anna fixed Gayle with a steady stare and opened her mouth to begin. At the very same moment, Richard unscrewed the lid of the urn and Anna choked back the words, hit by a pain in her chest that was as powerful as it was unexpected.

A high-pitched wailing pierced the bluster of the wind around them, not a cry of despair but something primal and raw.

Anna guessed that she must have lost her internal battle after all, that the moment the lid had come off the urn, the boiling emotions she’d been trying to keep at bay had overtaken her like a tidal wave. She clapped a hand over her mouth as Gayle crumpled beside her, dropping to the wrinkled wet sand, and Anna realized it wasn’t her making the noise after all. It was her mother-in-law, her perfectly put together mother-in-law.

The sand and saltwater were making an awful mess of Gayle’s smart outfit, but she didn’t seem to notice. She was too busy trying to grab a breath between the heaving sobs, supporting herself with one palm splayed against the damp sand, her fingertips digging in so deep they disappeared.

Anna wanted to grab Gayle by the arm and force her to stand up again, to make her stop that horrible noise. No, she wanted to scream. This was not your moment. This was not your husband. He was mine! And I was his happy place, not this soggy, dirty beach. I was what brought him the most joy!

Both Richard and Scott attempted to help Gayle up, but she batted their hands away, and her raw sobbing continued. Anna stared down at Spencer’s mother, and words from that strange late-night phone call on Valentine’s Day drifted into her mind.

When life changes suddenly and unexpectedly, there’s a grieving of what was and what can never be again. I would call that being human…

Yes, Anna reminded herself, finding steadiness – strength – from those words in what was otherwise a day full of vertiginous twists and turns. They grounded her, brought her back to what was real and true. Whatever Gayle has done today, she is human. And she deserves my compassion.

Slowly, carefully, she got down on her knees beside Gayle, put an arm around her shoulder and drew her close.

Chapter Eleven

ANNA FOLLOWED GAYLE and Richard’s Rover back from Camber Sands to their house, sitting stiff and tight-lipped behind the wheel of her car. Her anger had been quenched briefly when Gayle had broken down on the beach – no one could have remained unmoved by that gut-wrenching sorrow – but it had begun to grow again as she’d stood by helplessly while Richard and Scott had scattered Spencer, or what was left of him, onto the waves.

She guessed it was supposed to have been a dramatic send-off, but the tide or the currents must have been doing something strange because the tiny little pieces of her husband had floated in a greyish-white scum on top of the silt-laden water and lapped around their ankles. It had been horrible. She couldn’t have thought of a worse ending to an already unbearable day.

She’d been so bewildered that she hadn’t even remembered about the little yellow bungalow until she was halfway back to Gayle and Richard’s. The whole journey back the words she’d collected ready to say to her mother-in-law circled in her head, and now she felt like one of those unexploded Second World War bombs. The tiniest touch, the slightest wrong move and – Boom! – she would detonate.

She pulled into the drive behind Richard and Gayle. Getting out of the car was an effort, and not just because she was stiff from driving; she felt utterly exhausted and her body was rigid with tension. The front door of the house was open, Gayle standing beside it, ready to shoo her guests inside. Anna approached the threshold but stopped before stepping over it.

‘Anna?’ There was a whiff of irritation in her mother-inlaw’s tone and Anna felt her blood pressure rise. She couldn’t look at Gayle. She couldn’t even look at the hallway through the open door. She was only just about holding onto her last shred of self-control.

If she went in there and had to make polite conversation after all that had happened that afternoon, that bomb inside her would go off. She was just so angry. Horribly, horribly angry. But having a meltdown over cucumber sandwiches and teacakes wasn’t going to help anyone this afternoon.

‘I’m sorry…’ she muttered. ‘I think… I think I’ve got a migraine coming.’ And before Gayle could say anything else, Anna ran back to her car, jumped inside, and reversed out of the drive.

She knew Gayle would be staring after her as she drove away. What about the finger sandwiches, Anna? What about the vol au vents? But Anna didn’t care about the sodding vol au vents.

She drove home with her fingers tight around the steering wheel, jaw clenched, resisting the urge to use the accelerator to vent her anger. Hold on, she told herself. Just a little longer, then you can close your front door behind you, sink against it, and let it all out.

Almost an hour and a half later, thanks to a snarl-up around junction five, Anna hauled herself from her car and stared at her house. Just the sight of it almost brought tears of relief to her eyes. The walk to her front door seemed to go in slow motion, but she finally put the key in the lock, opened the door and then banged it closed behind her.

Thank God.

She sank against the back of the door and waited for the emotions to start flowing…

But nothing spilled out, nothing exploded. There was no pounding of fists on the tiled floor of her hallway or shouts of rage echoing up the stairwell. She opened her mouth, giving permission for the howl of fury she’d been keeping inside all the way back from the beach to emerge, but all she could hear was her own shallow breathing. She closed her eyes, giving tears a chance to gather behind her lids, but when she opened them again, they were as dry as Gayle’s pork and sage stuffing.

She let out a growl of frustration and made her way upstairs to her bedroom, where she lay down on the unmade bed and pulled the duvet up over her head. Damned if she did, damned if she didn’t. It was all too much.

But the usual comfort of her blank, white cocoon didn’t help her today. Even so, she closed her eyes and breathed in and out, at a total loss for anything else to do.

One moment, that was all she had wanted.

One moment to be still today, to remember him in the way she wanted to, so she could start doing what everyone was always telling her she needed to and move forward. But it seemed she wasn’t allowed that.

As much as the focus was always on Spencer when she visited his family, she couldn’t talk freely to Gayle, even though she wished she could, and she didn’t want to worry her own parents. Gabi tried, God bless her, she really did, but she only wanted to hear good and positive and healthy things, and the truth was, some days Anna was anything but those things. Sometimes she needed to be despondent and negative and toxic. It was the only way to let the poison out.

She lay under the duvet in a half-trance, letting her thoughts wander, like a bird hopping from branch to branch in search of a roost. They came to rest in an unexpected place.

There had been one person who’d listened, a someone who’d seemed to actually understand.

But this person was also a no one, an anonymous voice at the end of a phone line, completely unconnected from her life, from all the emotional baggage anyone who’d known her or Spencer came with.

Things happen, he’d said. Things that turn you upside down and your life takes a very different path.

Spencer’s number had been assigned to him, the no one. She really wanted to call that number again, she discovered, which was more than a little surprising. Maybe it was because, in her mind, he was still part of that connection to Spencer.

But phoning again would be completely weird. This time she’d be ringing to speak to him and not the ghost of her long-dead husband. This man. This stranger.

This kindred spirit.

That thought stuck in her head for the rest of the evening. She stayed in bed, reading, moping, staring at the ceiling. After a few hours, she took a bath and got into her PJs, then returned to bed to read and mope and stare at the ceiling some more.

Eventually, she could avoid the urge no longer. She pulled her phone off the bedside table and pressed the entry near the top of her ‘recents’ list, the number still labelled as ‘Spencer’. Her heart thudded as she waited for it to connect. She closed her eyes and prayed hard she wouldn’t hear the robotic voicemail message, and it seemed, for once, her prayers were to be answered. The ringing stopped, and shortly afterwards, a deep male voice said, ‘Yes?’

‘It’s me again,’ Anna replied, then blew a breath out to steady herself. ‘It’s Anna.’

Chapter Twelve

‘ANNA.’

There wasn’t a hint of surprise in his tone. There wasn’t a hint of much, actually.

Instead of apologizing and hanging up like any sensible person would have done, she asked, ‘Do you remember me?’

A pause followed, one she couldn’t interpret, then he said, ‘Yes. I remember you.’

A bald statement of fact. No joke that strange women who phoned at random times of day or night might be hard to forget. That was the sort of thing Spencer would have said, but this man wasn’t Spencer. She needed to remember that.

Her throat dried. Where were words when you needed them? She’d had thousands waiting and ready to go, but now they’d all run scurrying into the shadows.

‘I wondered if you’d phone again,’ he said.

‘Really? You were expecting me to?’ Until tonight she’d had no intention of doing so. How had he known?

‘More pondering the probability.’

And then it went silent again. She’d called him to talk, after all, but now she couldn’t think of a single thing to say.

And he clearly didn’t have anything to say to her.

Just like that, she knew she’d made a horrible mistake. Her words were clanging nails dropping on concrete. This wasn’t the lovely, warm, intimate bubble of conversation she’d imagined it would be. It wasn’t the place where she could spill her soul and find healing.

Oh, Anna. What have you done? It’s time to apologize for disturbing this man and put the phone down. Once again, you’ve conjured something from your imagination that isn’t there.

A terrible sense of loss came with this epiphany. However, there was one thing she needed to know before she pulled the phone away from her ear and ended the call. ‘When we talked before… How did you know?’

‘How did I know what?’

‘About the exploding… About the keeping it all in and then… just…’ She made a gesture with her hand, her fingers springing apart from a closed fist, and realized she was making no sense again. Good one, Anna. Should have hung up when you had the chance. From the silence on the other end of the line, she guessed he was thinking the same thing.

He breathed out, long and hard. ‘I just know.’

That was enough, just those three words. He’d said everything he needed to say, everything she needed him to say.

He got it. Not because someone had told him, but because he’d lived it too.

Anna choked back a sob. ‘Th-thank you,’ she sputtered as hot tears streamed silently down her cheeks.

More silence followed, but this time it was warm. Open. Giving her space, giving her permission. Anna started crying so hard she thought she’d run out of breath. She lost all sense of where she was, of time passing.

Eventually, she sat up, letting the duvet fall away from her face, and reached for a tissue from the box on the bedside table. The nose blow that followed was not very ladylike or demure. ‘Sorry,’ she whispered again, although she wasn’t quite sure if it was the gurgling, snotty noise or the crying in general that she was apologizing for.

‘You didn’t find Spencer?’ he asked.

Anna frowned, confused. ‘What?’

‘You were angry with him for leaving.’

It all came back then, how she’d rambled on the last time she’d called. Oh, God… What a fool she’d made of herself. He deserved some kind of explanation. ‘I am. I was… He’s not coming back. I know that now.’

There was a soft exhalation at the other end of the line, not so much a sigh but a gesture of recognition. ‘Are you better off without him?’

One corner of her mouth curled up in a twisted kind of smile. Even though he was wrong, that Spencer hadn’t left her of his own free will, she liked the way this man phrased it; he didn’t tell her she was better off but asked for her opinion on the matter. ‘No,’ she said truthfully. ‘I’m definitely not better off without him.’

Another breath… sigh… Whatever it was. He understood this too.

‘Will it always hurt this much?’ she asked.

‘Probably.’

She almost laughed. God, it was refreshing not to be given a platitude or a proverb.

‘He died,’ she said softly, not aware she was ready to tell this story until the words left her mouth. ‘He was thirty-one, and he died.’

‘Yet you phoned him,’ he said, clearly perplexed.

‘Yes. Stupid, isn’t it? Wanting to talk to someone who’ll never be able to hear you again, who’ll never be able to talk back.’

He let out a hollow laugh. ‘No.’

Anna closed her eyes as more tears surged down her face. Oh, the relief… ‘You have no idea how lovely it is to be able to say all of this, to be honest, and for someone else to understand.’

‘Then tell me more.’

Her eyes snapped open again. ‘Oh, I don’t think I should… I mean, I’ve invaded enough of your time already. You must have other things—’

‘I don’t,’ he said, cutting her off. ‘Not right now.’

‘But why would—?’

‘Because I wish I’d had someone.’ There was a pause, a moment of heaviness. ‘Someone I didn’t know. Someone who wouldn’t judge me… I won’t judge you, Anna.’

No, he wouldn’t. She knew that already. She’d known that before she’d picked up the phone this evening, hadn’t she?

So Anna talked. She told him about the day Spencer died, the darkness afterwards. She told him about the horrible time she’d had at the beach with Spencer’s family that day. And he listened. He didn’t say anything, didn’t comment, until she finally ran out of steam. ‘Sorry,’ she said again when she’d run out of words.

‘Why do you keep apologizing?’

‘Because… because normal people don’t do things like this,’ she replied.

‘Maybe they should.’

‘Even though I’m bothering you?’

‘You’re not.’

She wrinkled her nose. ‘I’m not?’

‘I’d have told you if you were, and then I’d have hung up.’

Anna couldn’t help laughing. She didn’t know much about this man, but she knew enough from his direct, no-nonsense answers that this was the truth, and for some reason that made it funny.

‘You know my life story,’ she mused, ‘and I know nothing about you.’

‘Nope.’

She smiled again. ‘Apart from the fact you’re not fazed by strange women phoning you up and pouring their life stories out to you. Is it a speciality of yours?’

There was a little huff that might have accompanied a smile. ‘I have to admit that you’re the first.’

For some reason that warmed her. She sighed. ‘I should probably stop tying up your phone line. Someone else might be trying to get through.’ She imagined friends, a wife, even, getting frustrated with an electronic voice apologetically telling them this person was busy.

‘I doubt it,’ he said in that same blunt tone. ‘This is a new phone number and I haven’t given it to anyone else yet.’

‘Oh.’ Anna shifted and reached behind her so she could readjust the pillows and lean back against the headboard. ‘But it’s been almost four months since I first called. I’m the only person you’ve talked to in all that time?’

‘You’re the only human being I’ve talked to, full stop.’

‘You speak to non-human beings?’ she blurted out, aware it was the most ridiculous response she could have offered. However, picking up the phone and dialling his number this evening had also been pretty ridiculous, so at least she was being consistent.

And then it occurred to her what he’d just said: he hadn’t talked to another soul in almost four months. That just wasn’t normal. Why hadn’t he? She’d been so focused on what she needed from him, she hadn’t even stopped to consider the truth of what she’d just told him – that she knew nothing about him. He could be in prison, in solitary confinement. That would be a very good reason not to have much social contact, wouldn’t it? He could be dangerous or psychologically disturbed. Or both. And here she was chatting away to him, telling him everything about herself.

He made a noise that might have been a laugh if it hadn’t been filled with such heaviness. ‘I talk to the dog sometimes. I have to, otherwise my vocal cords might atrophy.’

Atrophy. That was a good word, wasn’t it? A clever word. This man had education, so maybe he wasn’t a psychopathic, stalking axe-murderer behind bars after all. And he had a dog. That had to say something about the kind of person he was, didn’t it?

‘Why don’t you talk to anyone?’

‘My choice. I live in the middle of nowhere. Don’t get many visitors.’

Anna frowned. Was he a liar too? ‘And yet you still get a decent mobile phone reception?’

‘It’s weak, but I have a booster that amplifies the signal. When we had a storm just before Christmas and the landline went down for the fourth time in as many months, I decided I needed a backup.’

‘Hence the new phone and the new phone number,’ Anna said, sighing. ‘I bet you weren’t expecting this to happen when you got it.’

‘No.’ Again, no sense of irritation or weariness in his tone. She would have been on the verge of concluding that he was a bit strange not to mind her weird phone calls out of the blue, but now she knew just a little bit more about him, she wondered if maybe he was lonely. That would explain things.

And she did know a bit about him now. She crossed dangerous and psychotic off her mental list and added some new qualities: patient, calm and… kind. Yes, despite his bluntness and offhand demeanour, he’d been very kind to listen to her.

However, it struck her that there was one important bit of information she didn’t have about him. ‘I don’t know your name.’

‘It’s Brody.’

That fitted the deep gravel of his voice, somehow. She tried to picture him and came up with salt-and-pepper hair, maybe a beard. She got the sense he was older than she was, but it was hard to tell from his voice alone. He also sounded weary, as if he’d lived through a lot.

‘Brody,’ she repeated quietly, and then, because her manners hadn’t deserted her completely, she added. ‘It’s very nice to meet you.’

He laughed then, a proper deep rumble. ‘Surprisingly, I’m going to say “likewise”.’

There was nothing much left to say now. The bomb was no longer ticking away inside her. He’d defused it cleanly and effortlessly while they’d been talking, and she hadn’t even noticed. No explosion was imminent.

So that was that, then. It was time to go. The only problem was she didn’t know how to end a conversation like this. ‘Well,’ she began but was quickly drowned out by the insistent barking of a dog in the background on the other end of the line.

‘Hang on a sec,’ Brody muttered, and she could hear him putting the phone down and moving away, then mumbling something along the lines of: ‘Calm down! It’s only an owl.’ A few moments later he was back, sounding marginally more ruffled than he usually did, which was kind of reassuring. ‘Sorry about that.’

‘It’s okay,’ Anna replied. It had made her smile. She liked dogs. She and Spencer had talked about getting one not long before he died but had decided it wasn’t the best timing as Anna had just come off the pill and they were going to start trying for a baby. Another thing that had been stolen from her. But she wasn’t going to think about that right now. ‘Anyway, I just wanted to say—’

More barking.

‘Lewis!’ he shouted. ‘Quiet.’

There was such authority in his tone that the dog instantly fell silent.

‘You have a dog called Lewis?’ Anna asked, her voice raspy.

She heard movement and faint panting, and then he said, ‘Daft animal’ under his breath and she could picture the dog sitting at his knee and looking up at him with complete adoration as he scratched it between its ears. ‘Yes,’ he replied.

It was a sign.

Not from her deceased husband or anything stupid like that, but it was a sign. Why else would this man have not only her husband’s phone number but also a dog with exactly the same name as his favourite childhood pet? This was another connection that couldn’t be ignored.

‘Can I call you again?’ she blurted out.

He took a moment to reply. ‘If you need to.’

‘Thank you,’ she said quietly.

‘Goodb—’

She jumped in before he could finish. ‘Is it okay if we don’t say that word? I know it sounds strange, but I’ve had too much of “goodbye” today. Can we say something else or just hang up?’

He must have got used to her strange ways by now because he just said, ‘Fine’, not sounding offended in the slightest. Thank goodness. ‘Sleep well, Anna.’

She used all her determination to press her thumb onto her phone screen and make him disappear. After staring at her mobile for a few seconds, she turned out the light, thoroughly exhausted. She turned onto her back and lay staring at the ceiling, and for the first time that day, Anna breathed out. All the way.

Chapter Thirteen

BRODY STARED AT his shiny new phone. It was silent now, but the echo of Anna’s last words was still ringing in his ears. Lewis was nudging at his hand, asking for attention, but Brody kept his gaze on the screen. He didn’t actually expect it to jump into life again, but he kept looking at the display of recent calls. There were only four, all from the same number.

Each entry was just a row of digits. Eleven, to be exact. That was all that was left of her after she’d hung up. It seemed a little impersonal after the conversation they’d had.

He pressed ‘Add new contact’. All the while he was typing her name into the correct field, he told himself he didn’t really need to do this because she was the only person likely to call him in the foreseeable future – and that was only a vague possibility – but he carried on anyway until he was finished.

There was an icon next to her name, a lifeless little grey silhouette of a woman’s head on a paler background. It seemed too bland, so he pulled up the library of pictures that were preloaded onto the phone and chose one: an arching stalk of lily of the valley. For some reason, it seemed the most fitting.

She’d sounded young, more than a little fragile. Lost.

Brody knew what it was like to feel lost. He knew it very well. Maybe that was why he’d kept listening instead of hanging up.

He stuffed his phone in his jeans pocket, then went and fetched Lewis, let him out of the back door of the cottage one last time before they both settled down for the night – Lewis in his bed in the kitchen near the oil-fired Aga, and Brody upstairs in one of the low-ceilinged, black-beamed bedrooms. He lay in his bed and stared at the misty, moon-soaked clouds through the open curtains, thinking about the conversation he’d had with Anna.

She was still in the awful, early stages, when everything was raw and all-consuming, when you got stuck in an endless, grinding loop of hurt and sorrow. And regret. Don’t forget about the regret, he reminded himself. It might seem the most benign item on the list, but Brody knew it was the heavyweight. Regret would knock you to the floor with a single punch if you let it.

Did I lie to her? he wondered as he shifted, trying to get comfortable. Would it have made a difference if he’d had someone to talk to, some faceless person who hadn’t known him, who hadn’t been tainted by the knowledge of what had happened? Logically, it seemed possible, but he doubted it. He doubted it very much.

There was a faint scratching at the door, then it was nosed open by a naughty but rather hopeful terrier. Emboldened by the lack of a reprimand, the animal trotted over to the edge of the bed. A second later, the mattress dipped, and Brody felt the damp touch of a nose on his hand. Lewis collapsed on top of the duvet beside him and let out a long doggy sigh of contentment.

Brody usually kept his phone in his study, but it lay on the dark wood of the old and rickety bedside table. He drifted off to sleep, half-wondering if it would make another sound that night, but when he woke again the next morning, only four calls remained in the log. He shooed Lewis off the bed and dragged himself up.

He caught sight of his distorted reflection in the wardrobe mirror that was cloudy and dappled with age. When had he last had a shave? Last week? The one before? Whenever it was, he looked a state. Maybe he’d do it when he came back from his run. Although he didn’t know why he was thinking of bothering with shaving. There was no one here to impress. Only Lewis, and being a shaggy kind of dog, he’d probably prefer Brody the way he was.

He looked more like his father now he was getting older. There were a few specks of grey at his temple, which was expected, he supposed, given that on his last birthday he’d become officially middle-aged. Forty hadn’t been a shock, though. He’d felt older than that for years now. Much older.

The lanes that criss-crossed this part of the moor were still sleepy with mist when he set out. The nearest village was five miles away, and the nearest town more like thirty, which was exactly why he’d chosen this spot for his home. Most likely, the only living things he’d see on his route were some cows and a few rooks.

He checked his watch as he began to run. The grocery delivery was due at eight, so he’d make sure he was back at least ten minutes before that. He turned and vaulted over a farm gate, which was no problem, thanks to his long legs, and powered up the edge of a muddy field towards the top of a steep hill.

When he returned to the cottage, dripping with sweat, the pleasant sting of lactic acid in his muscles, Lewis came bounding into the yard to greet him. However, something else was also in his yard – a van with Hexworthy Organics emblazoned on its side in large green letters, its engine idling.

Crap. It was early.

Lewis, the traitor, went running off, tail wagging, to greet the driver, but Brody cut around the back of the outbuildings that were part of his property. Talking to the man wasn’t necessary: he always left a note with his order for the driver to leave everything in the small and very ancient conservatory that served as a mudroom. He wouldn’t quibble about substitutions. He’d take whatever they brought.

He entered his garden and slipped back into the house through the French doors that led from the patio into his living room and then entered the study next door. This guy must be new, because he was pounding on the front door, yelling: ‘Hello?’ Lewis was barking along, just for the sheer joy of joining in. Stupid dog.

Read your clipboard, mate, Brody thought. All the relevant information is on there, and then you can sling your hook and leave me alone.

What Brody could really do with was a shower, but the stairs could be seen through the glazed portion of the front door, so he sat down in his desk chair and waited, staring at a patch of chipped paint on the windowsill until the knocking stopped and he heard the rumble of an engine pulling out of the yard and disappearing down the lane.

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