She pulled up her jeans as she went to the kitchen and heard Demi laughing. She knew they’d get on, but Demi and Johnny were the kind of people you could introduce to anyone. It struck her that she’d just introduced the first person from her old life into her new one. The stint in London earlier in the year, when she’d bumped into plenty of ghosts in her forgotten closet, hadn’t been the same. This was her home. It was the same with Ted. He was part of her new life and he’d introduced her to his old one through his daughters, June and Amber. It felt good. It was the sort of bond that she hadn’t experienced since her father took her hiking every weekend and they shared sandwiches on the top of Wainwrights.

That all changed when she went to college and discovered her wanderlust. The alliances she’d forged along the rocky road of childhood were severed and she never replaced them in London. Most of her friendships had been based around nights out and casual banter. Lately, a solid lump of security had formed somewhere inside her, and it gave her a warmth that hadn’t been there before. Connections: she finally got what all the fuss was about. Sure, she’d related to plenty of people in her career, from the lowest to the highest ranks, but in her personal life, it was something she mainly avoided. She’d assumed that all women were like her sister, and all men were like Dave Crawley: desperate to get her wedded and pregnant. She’d almost said yes when he proposed fifteen years ago. Thank God she hadn’t. She shivered slightly as she thought of Dave Crawley’s new freedom out of HMP Altcourse. It was a part of the job that wasn’t advertised widely: the bitter taste of frustration when the law failed. If she examined the British legal system too closely, with its seemingly random habits of jailing an armed burglar for twenty years but a rapist of a child for two, she’d go crazy.

But it did give her an idea.

Thinking about Dave made her think, inevitably, of her sister. She tapped Nikki’s number into her phone. She hadn’t deleted it; they were still family. Nikki answered quickly and Kelly wasn’t ready. She closed the door to the kitchen and took a deep breath.

‘Kelly! To what do I owe this pleasure?’

Sarcasm dripped off her sister’s tongue, as always. It was her favourite method of communicating, like all people who don’t know how else to communicate. Kelly wondered if Nikki ever experienced the reassurance of connection that she’d just discovered, by staying in the Lakes all her life, with her old buddies.

‘Hi, Nikki. It’s a work call really. How are you?’