Joanna had received numerous offers from people hungry to exploit the advantages of that particular piece of land, but she didn’t want to sell. She’d thought about Walter, pruning his fruit trees, and her father starting every day with a swim in the ocean.

Instead of selling, she’d hired an architect. The development had been costly in both money and time but eventually a new beach house was completed, a contemporary masterpiece, blending sympathetically with its surroundings, exploiting all that was special about the landscape. She knew instinctively that her father would have approved, even though all that was left of the original Otter’s Nest was the name.

For all its appeal, Joanna had never stayed there herself. She’d employed a company to manage it, and occasionally to rent it out. It was a business decision.

But coming back now wasn’t business. It was personal.

She’d sleep in the bedroom with its wall of floor-to-ceiling glass overlooking the ocean. She’d sip her morning coffee on the terrace sheltered from the outside world by towering trees. She’d walk barefoot on the heated stone floors, relax in the tub with its view over the garden and follow the narrow sandy path that led the short distance to the beach. Otter’s Nest was far from the worn and weathered bungalow that had been her home growing up. Now it was a premium property on a coastline known for premium properties. But it was still a beach house, and in huge demand despite the eye-watering rental costs.

She’d called the agent a few days earlier and asked them to cancel all reservations and make the place ready because she was loaning it to a friend. They’d probably figure out that she was intending to use it herself, which was another reason she wasn’t confident that their whereabouts would remain a secret for long.

Cliff would have laughed at her attempts to regain a degree of privacy. Privacy, anonymity, had been his idea of hell.

She was one of the few people, perhaps the only person, who had understood the depths of Cliff’s insecurity.

He needed five portions of praise a day to survive, and more to truly thrive. When things were going well he bounced through the door with a megawatt smile, energized by the positive attention. He was his own weather system—on a high one minute and in a depression the next. If ratings of his show were down, or the restaurants weren’t booked out weeks in advance, his mood would change from sunny to volcanic. She’d been drawn to the sunny, and then learned to live with the other side of him. No one was perfect, were they? She definitely wasn’t perfect, as her stepmother had frequently pointed out.

“This place we’re going...” Ashley turned her head and looked at her. “You own it?”