But before Tara could finish the sentence, something moved in the garden and caught her eye. She stopped dead in her tracks.

There was someone in the back garden.

A young girl in a white T-shirt and blue jeans, sitting on the grass in what was left of the late evening light. Her hair was plaited in a thick black braid that hung down her back, and her head was bent in deep concentration over the book she was reading. She looked – to Tara’s inexperienced eye – to be about ten.

There was a dog lying next to her, a chunky yellow Labrador fast asleep against her long legs.

Tara’s mouth dropped open. Branston? And if that was Branston, who was the little girl?

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Tara stared out across the kitchen as if the window was opening out not on to the garden now, but the same garden held in a bubble of time twenty years ago.

She couldn’t move. She could only just take tiny sips of breath into her lungs. Was this real? Or was she somehow looking backwards at herself?

The girl in the garden was as still as a photograph, and there was an eerie déjà vu about her pose: her dark head was bent over a book, as she read with the same intense concentration that Tara had seen in old photos of herself. One thick black plait hung down her back like a plumb line; a faint frown creased her high forehead. She sat cross-legged, and the paleness of her knees showed through stringy rips in her jeans. Next to her, the Labrador lay with its broad head on its paws, eyes shut, dozing in exactly the same way Branston had slept next to Tara, in the summer evenings when she’d read Agatha Christies in the rose garden until the sun faded into dusk and the yellow light on the pages was cast from the upper-storey studio windows behind her, and Mum had yelled at them both to come in because dinner was on the table getting cold.

Tara’s tongue clacked against her dry mouth. Was that her? Her in the summer before Dad left, when they were a normal family, and she and Toby had no idea it was the last holiday they’d have together? Had Dad’s return re-awoken this unhappy ghost of herself? Was she hallucinating what she couldn’t change?

A hot magenta sunset streaked the sky, dappling light through the big silver birch, and the wine she’d drunk with David seemed to detach her brain from her body.

I was so small, Tara realized suddenly, gripped with an urge to hug the ten-year-old Tara to her chest and throw herself against the changes looming as the season turned. I was so SMALL. I knew NOTHING. How could he leave me? How could he walk away from us? And Branston. Was Branston’s sadness stuck in this limbo too?