Museum Gardens was her favourite spot to take a break, with its riverside setting, medieval abbey ruins and flower-filled borders. Today, though, her phone started ringing before she had arrived there, and she stopped to answer it in the street. The caller was Margaret from SlimmerYou, according to the screen, and Bunny steeled herself in readiness. After Gloucestershire, she had vowed she wouldn’t take on any more promotional work, but Margaret would wheedle and beg, she knew. Bunny would have to be firm this time, stick to her guns. ‘Margaret, hi,’ she said. ‘How are you?’

‘Well, to be honest, I’m a little bit concerned,’ Margaret said without so much as a ‘hello’. ‘It sounds as if there was something of a to-do at your talk last week. I hope you’re all right.’

Ah. So word had got back to head office. This put a different spin on things. Bunny swallowed, wondering if she could speak honestly to Margaret. She’d only met her once before – a commanding sort of person in her fifties – but she’d liked the other woman’s crisp, practical manner. ‘I’m fine,’ she replied after a moment. ‘Absolutely fine.’

‘It did sound rather unpleasant,’ Margaret went on. ‘Is there anything you need to tell me?’

‘Um . . .’ Bunny hesitated. Sometimes when you kept a secret to yourself – a bad secret – it swelled up bigger and nastier, the longer you remained silent. Obviously she hadn’t been able to tell Dave what had happened at the Cotswold village hall the other week, because that would have meant unrolling the full awful story for him. But maybe Margaret, another woman, would understand, if Bunny explained. ‘The thing is . . .’ she began, and then out it came. ‘I was in an abusive relationship,’ she said in a tiny voice, edging around the side of the shop into an alley so that nobody would hear her. ‘And one day he was beating me. Quite badly. I thought I might die. And so I . . . I defended myself.’

‘You stabbed him, is that right?’ Margaret had always been very businesslike, but the brisk, matter-of-fact manner in which she asked the question quite took Bunny’s breath away.

‘Well . . . yes,’ she replied after a moment. ‘In self-defence. And I—’

‘I see,’ Margaret said. Clearly, for her to have asked the question in the first place, she’d already known that this was the answer, but she sounded horribly disapproving, as if her worst fears about Bunny had just been confirmed. ‘And this man in the audience last week recognized you, and brought it to the attention of the entire gathering, I hear. One hundred and fifty-two people, might I add, according to Sally, the organizer.’

‘Yes,’ Bunny said humbly, wrapping her arms around herself. She was leaning against the brick wall of the building and could smell the ripe pong of a nearby dumpster. The air was muggy and fetid, but she was shivering all of a sudden.