Her heart thumped and she slid down from the rock, scraping her leg in the process. What had she done? Had she just given herself away? No. No one would have recognized her from that distance, particularly when they weren’t expecting her to be here. She was just a woman sitting on the rock. She could be anyone. Joanna tried to calm the panic that churned inside her.

Just because she and Mel had run on the beach together almost every morning didn’t mean her old friend still kept to the same routine.

She felt a pang of nostalgia.

Mel had been her best friend. The person she trusted most in the world. But Mel was Nate’s twin sister, which had made everything impossible.

Joanna had looked her up the week before, unable to resist the pull from the past.

She’d found out that Mel still lived here, which hadn’t come as a surprise. She was now married to Greg, which wasn’t a surprise, either. They had a daughter, Eden, and Joanna had felt a pang remembering the times they’d talked about raising their families together. They’d be in and out of each other’s gardens, enjoying backyard barbecues and beach picnics. Mel and Greg. Joanna and Nate.

Nate.

She felt a sting of sadness and headed back up the path to the beach house.

She wasn’t going to think about Nate, and she didn’t need to worry about bumping into him because she had no intention of strolling into town or eating on the deck of the Surf Café.

She’d keep her life small and quiet, because she’d learned that it was better that way.

In all the words that had been written about her, there was one thing the press had missed.

She was, quite possibly, the loneliest woman in the world.

9

Ashley

Ashley woke to the sound of waves breaking on rock. A cool breeze wafted through the window. She lay there, groggy and disorientated, and then remembered where she was. Joanna Whitman’s beach house. The bed was ridiculously comfortable and the pillows so soft it was like sleeping on a cloud. After nights of shifting restlessly on a hard, unyielding hospital bed, her skin irritated by rough sheets, this bed felt like something out of a fantasy. But the rest of it?

That was more like a horror movie and the big twist was yet to come.

She wanted to postpone the moment. She wanted to stay right here, cocooned in luxury, and pretend she was on vacation. She didn’t want to have to wake up properly and face her problems.

She wished she’d never come to LA. She wished she’d never met Cliff. She wished she’d never climbed into his car or said what she’d said.