Instantly she felt some of the tension drain away. Milly wasn’t the only one who loved this place. She loved it too. It was geared toward outdoor life, and people staying here spent their time swimming, kayaking and having fun on the lake, hiking the fells, and cycling up steep mountain passes. Milly’s mother believed in active holidays where you had fun and got muddy, and Forest Nest provided the perfect base for those experiences.

Nicole’s mother, by contrast, had considered every holiday to be an opportunity for intellectual improvement, and Nicole had spent numerous sweaty summer weeks pounding the streets of Rome, Florence and Paris bored out of her mind as her mother lectured her on art and architecture. A talented vascular surgeon, Alexandra Walker (she’d drawn the line at taking her husband’s name) had forgone a career in London in order to accommodate her husband’s wish to live in rural Cumbria. A passionate conservationist, he was the one who had wanted children, and she’d agreed on the understanding that he would take responsibility for childcare. Unfortunately he’d reneged on that promise by dying two years after the move, leaving Alexandra with a lesser career and a parental role that was both unfamiliar and unwanted. Consigned to a life of disappointing compromise, she had spent her time trying to push her daughter to heights she herself had failed to achieve. She believed that every moment of the day should have a purpose and that time was wasted if it wasn’t spent on self-improvement. Fortunately for Nicole that meant that her mother saw the long summer holidays as an inconvenience rather than an opportunity to spend time with her only daughter, so apart from their compulsory art appreciation week, Nicole had been allowed to stay with Milly for the rest of the time, providing she met certain study goals.

The summers she’d spent at Forest Nest were the happiest of her life. She and Milly had been expected to help out and do chores, but once they were done, their time was their own. She’d learned to swim and kayak. She’d headed into the fells with Milly and her mother and learned to rock climb, and she’d felt guilty for lying awake at night wishing she’d been born into a different family. A family where individuality was encouraged. Where you were loved for who you were rather than what you did.

Nicole had spent most of her life trying to make her mother proud, but so far it hadn’t happened. Thanks to the lurid headlines of the last few days, she was resigned to the fact that it never would.

What must her mother be thinking now?

Nicole could almost hear her sigh of disappointment.

“Remember when my mother was encouraging me to be a doctor? She set up all those visits to medical schools.”