Oh, do keep him dangling.’ Lizzie clapped and gave her the thumbs up. ‘Honestly, he’s like a bear with a sore head these days. He asked me why had you left. I said his guess was as good as mine. “Didn’t she confide in you?” he asked. “Didn’t she confide in you?” I asked back. You should have seen his face! He didn’t know whether he was coming or going.’

‘Oh, Lizzie, you’re such a great pal,’ Marie-Claire laughed. ‘I miss you.’

‘I miss you too, honey, but I’m glad you finished with him before you got in too deep. Go to bed and put everything out of your head, it won’t look so bad in the morning,’ Lizzie advised kindly and blew her a kiss before hanging up.

Marie-Claire turned off the iPad and took some cotton pads out of her toilet bag and began to wipe off the expensive products that had gone into making up her elegant façade. Would things look better in the morning as Lizzie suggested? She hardly thought so.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Brigid woke to the shrill beep of the alarm clock on her phone. It was six-fifty a.m. She had ten minutes’ snooze time, a luxury she allowed herself when she was in the Four Winds. She was so snug and warm and she lay drowsily enjoying the comfort of her bed until a memory slithered into her consciousness and her stomach lurched.

Best face the music and get it over and done with, Brigid decided. She got out of bed reluctantly and brushed her short grey hair in front of the mirror, noting her pale visage. Thanks to the brandy, she’d slept the night through, much to her surprise.

Her pallor was the only outward sign of her inner turmoil. The stomach-knotting, heartsick, roiling emotional havoc that last night’s incident had wrought would be kept suppressed. It was her way.

She gazed at the veil and habit she’d worn for practically all of her adult life, hanging on the hook on her bedroom door. It was a garment she had no right to wear. I’m a fraud, Brigid thought sadly.

She hurried into the bathroom across the landing and performed her morning ablutions, listening to the rattling of the elderly radiator pipes that already had the house warm from the frosty chill outside. Slipping silently back into her room, she donned her habit. Though she felt undressed, unfinished without her veil, she had decided she would never wear it again. Next week, after she’d things sorted out, she would ask Marie-Claire to bring her shopping for lay clothes. Taking a deep breath, she opened her door and stepped onto the landing.