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About the Author

Isabelle Broom was born in Cambridge nine days before the 1980s began and studied Media Arts in London before joining the ranks at Heat magazine, where she later became the Book Reviews editor. Always happiest when she is off on an adventure, Isabelle now travels all over the world seeking out settings for her novels, as well as making the annual pilgrimage to her true home – the Greek island of Zakynthos. Currently based in Suffolk, where she shares a cottage with her two dogs and approximately 467 spiders, Isabelle fits her writing around a busy freelance career and tries her best not to be crushed to oblivion under her ever-growing pile of to-be-read books.

By the same author

My Map of You

A Year and a Day

The Place We Met

Then. Now. Always

One Thousand Stars and You

Dedication

For the brave, brilliant
(and utterly bananas) Ian Lawton

1

The morning began as so many do in winter, with low-hanging fog and a smattering of frost. For weeks the sky has been the muted silver of a much-thumbed coin, but today the sun has broken through, laundering my little Cambridgeshire village with light.

As I walk the ten or so minutes to the pub, I relish this new brightness which has brought with it so much colour – red berries in a thicket of holly, a battalion of purple pansies in a window box, and perched on the wall outside the church, a blue tit, its head cocked inquisitively to one side.

I see David as soon as I cross the threshold of the White Swan. He is easy to spot, with his round bald head and those John Lennon-style glasses, which he wears balanced precariously on the end of his nose. In all the early family photos of him, Anna and myself, David has thick, black curls, much like my own, but his hair started to thin rapidly the year he turned forty, and now, at fifty-eight, there’s barely a strand remaining. Strangers used to comment on David’s hair when I was a child, telling me how fortunate I was to have inherited it. I always smiled away and allowed them their assumptions – in fact, I enjoyed hearing them. In the eyes of those people, I was a normal daughter, from a normal family, living a normal life.

I once read that the average human life has seventeen possible starting points. Some believe it begins at conception, others the moment of birth, while for a few the transition into adulthood marks the real beginning. I suppose our life is a story, and we are its author – therefore it’s down to us to decide which chapter means the most to us.