“What?” She sat up and rubbed her eyes. “I was going to drop Zoe at school and then come straight over. What has happened?”

“There are photographers everywhere. Mostly men with cameras. They’re swarming all over the boathouse.”

Milly’s stomach dropped. “Nicole—”

“Fortunately she stayed over with me last night. I went into work early this morning and saw a man with a long lens in the bushes. Then another group arrived. We have a problem.”

Milly registered briefly that Nicole had stayed the night with Joel, then pushed it out of her mind. She’d think about that later. There were more urgent things to deal with.

This had happened because Nicole had come to the hospital to give her support. She needed to try and fix it.

“Don’t let her leave the house.” She was out of bed and pulling on clothes as she spoke. How on earth were they going to extract Nicole from this? “I’ll drop Zoe at school early and come straight over. Nanna Peg will stay with my mother.” She comforted herself with the fact that her mother had seemed fine the evening before.

“Be careful,” Joel said. “They might follow you.”

“I doubt they know who I am, but just to be sure I’ll park far away from your house and approach from the trail. No one will see me.”

An hour later she was driving back to the village, wondering why photographers would be at the boathouse. That didn’t make sense. If someone had followed Nicole from the hospital then they’d be outside Joel’s cottage, surely?

She checked her mirrors constantly, but there was no sign of anyone following her, so she pulled over and parked outside an outdoor store at the edge of the village, grabbed her bag and headed up the narrow unmarked trail that passed behind Joel’s cottage.

She slipped in through the gate, crossed his sunny garden and tapped gently on the French doors.

Joel opened them, and she stepped inside.

“I didn’t see anyone. And this doesn’t make sense to me. If someone at the hospital saw her, why would they be at the boathouse?”

“I don’t think it was anything to do with the hospital. We’re assuming it might be the couple we met the day before yesterday on our walk. They recognized me.” Nicole was tucked into one corner of the sofa. Her legs were smooth and tanned and endless from beneath cutoff shorts, and everything about her seemed so perfect it was hard to believe that less than ten minutes’ drive away a crowd of photographers and journalists were hovering in the hope of uncovering some scandal they could expose.

“You should have tried harder to behave like a normal person, Wendy,” Joel said. “You’re a terrible actor.”