So why then could Willow not allow herself to believe that maybe she deserved this chance to be happy with Rick?

Chapter Three

It was a beautiful spring morning and with the tide out, wading birds were busy searching the mudflats for cockles to prise apart with their long probing beaks.

Coffee cup in hand, and aching in places a woman of sixty-three years of age had no right to ache, Naomi Miller shielded her eyes from the April sunshine and made herself comfortable on the bench at the end of the garden. The silvered wood of the seat gave her the best view of the shoreline; from here she could observe all the comings and goings of the beach, as well as the birdlife.

She and Colin had bought Anchor House thirty-two years ago, shortly before Willow was born and when Martha was already three years old. Back then she and Colin couldn’t believe their luck in being able to afford a spacious five-bedroom Edwardian house like this with a large garden that stretched down to the beach. It had been a dramatic leap up from their terraced house in south London, and they had taken to life here in Tilsham Harbour like … well, like ducks to water.

That’s what Colin used to say when anybody asked how they were enjoying their new life out of London.

‘Oh, we’ve taken to it like ducks to water,’ he’d tell them.

Not that Colin had been here all the time. From Monday to Friday he’d stayed in a small studio flat in London while working in the City, then straight after lunch on Friday he would drive down to Sussex to be with Naomi and the children. A lot of his weekends were spent sailing and he loved being out on the water, nothing gave him more pleasure. It was the sense of freedom he’d enjoyed, that and pitting himself against the elements.

It had been a great disappointment to him that his wife had never shared his love of sailing. Naomi had shown willing from time to time and gone out in the boat with him, but too often he would bellow some order or other which she would misunderstand and do entirely the wrong thing. She much preferred pottering around their little harbour, no more than an inlet really, in a small rowing dinghy. She was not a natural sailor, and to Colin’s further disappointment, neither were his daughters.

It used to exasperate him that she didn’t know one sailing boat from another. To her they were just boats with sails. Yes, she could tell the difference between the older craft made of wood and the fibreglass ones, but she couldn’t put a name to them. And never saw any reason to do so. Perhaps it had just been her being stubborn and bloody-minded, which she knew she was apt to do.

Her interests lay more on terra firma, in particular the garden at Anchor House. Before they bought the house, the garden had been left to its own devices by the previous owners, an elderly couple no longer able to keep on top of it all.