Back when she was a teenager, there’d been an advert in the local paper one week for a Saturday girl at the New Age shop in town. She’d rung up to find out more, only to be asked for her date of birth. ‘The manager needs to study your star chart to see if you’re suitable,’ she was told. A few long moments later the judgement came. ‘Sorry,’ the woman on the phone said, ‘but it’s a no. We don’t think you’d be right for the job.’

‘Oh,’ Bunny – Rachel, rather – had replied, taken aback by this unorthodox recruitment process. She’d gone on to get a Saturday job in a supermarket instead, where they were more interested in your numeracy skills and friendliness with customers, rather than your star sign, thankfully. It had niggled at her ever since, though, that brusque rejection, the lack of further explanation. What had the manager seen in her birth chart that had been so off-putting, she sometimes wondered. Had they known from her planetary alignments that she would turn out to be the sort of person who plunged a knife into a man in a desperate fight-or-die adrenalin rush?

She had spent eighteen months trying not to think about Mark Roberts, but after the Cotswold slimmers-group nightmare, he was back and lurking in her head like an evil spirit. Is it true you stabbed your husband? the man from the other evening repeated in Bunny’s ear as she ate breakfast with Dave, as she folded their laundry, as he made them spaghetti carbonara for dinner, whistling and sloshing extra wine into the sauce. She didn’t deserve such a lovely boyfriend, she thought as she listened to his breathing in bed at night, as he rolled over in his sleep and flung a loving arm across her. Oh, Dave. And he was going to find out the truth about her one day – he was certain to – and he would be so, so disappointed. He would look at her in shock, wounded by her betrayal, devastated by her double life.

It would only take one suspicious member of the Cotswold audience to think, That was a bit weird. I wonder if . . . ? and then begin hunting about on the Internet, for the walls to start crumbling. She could already imagine the tabloid headlines: ‘Slimmer of the Year’s Secret Shame.’ ‘Former Fattie’s Hunger for Violence.’ ‘Slice Vegetables? I’d Rather—’

All right, calm down. No need to get carried away, she told herself, as her imagination spiralled out of control. It felt as if her luck was trickling through her fingers, though. As if all the skeletons in her cupboard were scrambling to get out and catch up with her, their bones clicking and clacking like castanets. As if Rachel – poor old unhappy Rachel – was resurfacing once more, clawing her way back up into Bunny’s nice new life, like it or not.