Shortly after three, still preoccupied, thinking about the weekend to come and the arrival of her guests, she left the house to take the four dogs—two fat Labradors and two violent Jack Russells—for their afternoon walk. She left Daniel with Jess, a neighborhood girl who’d come to help in the preparations for the weekend. Both were now engaged in making little sponge cakes for tea. In the garden Charlotte paused and looked back through the bright rectangle of the kitchen window, the dogs woofing and circling at her heels.

Jess was beating up sugar and butter; Daniel was assembling the cake decorations he loved, the crystallized violets, brightly colored sweets, and silver balls. Daniel liked cakes only with acid-pink icing and lots of decorations. For his fourth birthday next month, they were going to make one in the shape of his favorite animal, a hedgehog. It was to be a pink hedgehog, with chocolate-flake quills.

It was a beautiful cold, clear afternoon; the air smelled of damp earth and woodsmoke. By the time Charlotte had reached the end of her driveway, she felt calmer and soothed. Her natural serenity—the quality in her that Max most loved—was beginning to reassert itself. She tightened the bright red headscarf over her untidy hair, clasped her old coat tighter around her stomach, whistled to the dogs, and set off on her usual circuit. She would walk down to the river, past the church, and then back across the hills. By the time she reached home again, it would be almost time for Gini and Lindsay to arrive. She would just have time to shut the hens in the henhouse before it grew dark—and she must remember to do that, for there was a dog-fox hunting the area. Then, once Jess had returned to her own family, and her own older sons had returned from school, they would make tea. Toast on the fire, Charlotte thought; Danny’s acid-pink iced sponge cakes. It would be fun. She was looking forward to seeing Lindsay. In fact, Charlotte thought with a smile, she had plans for Lindsay. Her husband, Max, might have his doubts about those plans, but Charlotte, a born matchmaker, believed they might work.

Lindsay was warmhearted, independent, and strong. But Lindsay’s life, unlike her own, was difficult. She had a son who desperately needed a father figure. His own father, Lindsay’s ex-husband, whom Charlotte had met once and instantly loathed, was a handsome, weak-willed deadbeat, last heard of in Canada, who contacted Lindsay rarely and Tom never, and who put in an appearance only when short of cash, or abandoned by the latest in a long line of girls.

Lindsay deserved better than a man who had walked out on her six months after Tom’s birth. She deserved better than to spend the rest of her life supporting her supremely selfish mother—and that, once Tom left home, was a possible fate, Charlotte feared. Every man with whom Lindsay had ever been seriously involved since her divorce had been chased off by Louise, whose instinct for self-preservation was acute. Lindsay needed a man capable of freeing her from her mother’s clasp. Charlotte, much to her husband’s surprise, even had a candidate for this role; a gallant knight who would rescue her friend.