After Rory’s disastrous reaction to the news of his impending return to his mother, Louisa had decided that the Grant family could do with time to themselves and despite Isobel’s insistence that she was more than welcome to stay around had firmly taken herself off for the afternoon. She would have liked to go to the House of Bruar for a spending spree herself, but had no taste for playing gooseberry and the likelihood of running into Christopher and Marnie was too strong. She was normally perfectly happy to go sightseeing or exploring on her own, and had often found it positively enjoyable to get away by herself when she’d been juggling the conflicting priorities of a high-powered job, a demanding boss, a hectic social life and a committed relationship. But it’s one thing to choose solitude for temporary escape, quite another to be alone because you feel yourself unwanted. Happy, resilient Louisa, who prided herself on her powers of recuperation and believed passionately in the near-magical benefits to health and well-being of positive thinking, had set off up the hill where she and Marnie had walked on their first day at Glendrochatt, sat on the same rock by the burn, taken the lid off her cauldron of secret fears and longings – and peered inside.

I’ve got everything going for me, she thought . . . why have I hit such an unexpected down now? I set off with such optimism. Where has it disappeared to? I’m free to travel, which I’ve always wanted to do. I could belatedly explore all those gap-year places I longed to visit but couldn’t manage when I was the right age. She reviewed other exciting possibilities: a new job, not perhaps as well paid as her last one, but reflecting her personal interests more – in publishing, say, or the art world? She might do a course on fine art at the V&A and become a lecturer on the Nadfas circuit, something she had considered and been drawn to before. She didn’t think an attempt at a novel was a serious option at the moment, though it might remain on the back burner. She had always shied away from thoughts of having babies; for a long time the uncertainty of her future health – now she hoped a thing of the past – had made her afraid to contemplate maternity in case it would eventually be denied her and she’d turned down the chance of marriage and children with Adam, telling herself – and him – that it would be too restricting, too demanding. Yet underneath these ideas for her future was a continuous, steady ticking which she did not want to hear, as the pendulum on her biological clock swung to and fro . . . to and fro . . . with maddening persistence.