She and her brother would talk about it now and then, with the conversational shorthand that came from mutual trauma. ‘Do you ever think about her?’ one of them would say. ‘All the time,’ the other would reply. It was almost better to believe that she had died, they decided. That she had died all those years ago and her body must never have been found. Surely she would have come back, otherwise? Surely she would have made contact with her own children?

Finally, five and a half years ago, word had come through via their aunt, Sylvia’s sister, that apparently she had died in the US. She had been there for the last twenty-one years, it turned out, although details were thin on the ground. A lawyer had passed on the news; it was a surprise to everyone. A horrible surprise, as it turned out, the worst kind. So she’d been alive all that time, but didn’t want her family to know. Didn’t want to see them or hear them. She had wiped the slate clean, left the country and started over. It had hurt so badly, Olivia could hardly bear the pain. Was it any surprise that when she had met Mack a few weeks later – Mack, who seemed so sturdy and together and solid – she had clung to him like a drowning woman reaching a life-raft? He had made her feel safer. He seemed reliable, the kind of person who wouldn’t abandon another without warning.

And yet here was Olivia now, being the one to abandon him. Leaving their children with Brenda Hollins next door because she couldn’t cut it any more. It was the moment she had always feared would come; that she’d turn out to be just like Sylvia. Hadn’t she known it all along?

What a rubbish person she was, she thought, gulping back a sob. Weak and spineless and shit. It would be better for everyone if she kept on driving until she reached the coast and went sailing right on over it.

Chapter Ten

Here they were again: the day had arrived, as it always did, every single year. It was Monday and therefore the anniversary of the most terrible episode in Lorna’s life. And this year marked two whole decades since it had happened.

He’d be thirty-eight now, her Aidan, if he’d survived. Thirty-eight years old, a middle-aged man! He’d have married his teenage sweetheart, no doubt – he was the most loyal boy you could imagine – and they’d have had children too by now, she guessed. A girl and a boy, she liked to daydream, both with his blue eyes and wide smile. And wouldn’t Lorna and Roy enjoy spoiling their grandchildren rotten? Her friends were all nannies and grandmas and grannies these days, but nobody would be calling Lorna one of those names, unfortunately.