When she had called him in the morning, he had told her that Jessica had left him. That everyone he had ever loved always left him. The sting in his voice left no doubt that he was talking about her. His hurt ran down the phone line like treacle she had no idea how to wade through. Her heart went out to him but she couldn’t find the words she needed to say how sorry she was. She knew only too well the pain of being abandoned, but that didn’t mean she had the answers, or that she had ever had the right to abandon him too. But she had had her career to think about …

Remembering their argument still hurt but reaching out across the void between them just seemed to get harder and harder as time went by. He had ignored her calls over the following weeks, and she knew that if she had tried to get in touch later, while she was ill, she would just have looked needy, come across as a sick woman desperate for sympathy and for her son to come back and look after her, and the irony of that, after all the years when she should have been there to look after him, was far from lost on her. No, it wouldn’t have been fair. She’d had to deal with this on her own, even spending Christmas by herself, lying low, doing very little, as she recovered from her mastectomy. He had sent a card but no invitation to meet, and there had been no festive phone call. Clearly, he found it hard to forgive, but not telling him about her cancer felt like the right thing to do and being alone to face it was quite possibly exactly what she had deserved. But now she was on the mend, maybe …

She carefully positioned her wig on her head and pulled a chiffon scarf over the top, tying it securely under her chin, still not comfortable or confident enough wearing the damned thing to trust it to stay in place. She dreaded to think what she must look like, but going out without it would feel a whole lot worse. She picked up a deep canvas shopping bag she found hanging on a hook in the kitchen and popped her purse and keys inside it, deliberately leaving her handbag with its mobile phone and diary and everything else that marked her out as Madalyn Cardew, escapee, behind. On the dresser, she told herself, trying to imprint exactly where she had left them onto her memory, desperate to retrain it before she mislaid anything else. It had happened too often in the last six months or so. It must be a sign that she was getting old, that perhaps a little part of her mind was starting to slip away and might never come back. She shivered at the thought and peered into the bag again, just to make sure she really had picked up the keys.