Margaret wasn’t an easy person to argue with and so, after some toing and froing, Bunny had eventually caved in and said, ‘Okay, just this once.’ But that was it. She would sneak back into the county for one single night, she had decided, do her thing and then slink away again, as if she’d never been there at all. Having deliberately cut her ties with the area, the last thing she wanted was to find herself getting tangled up in any loose threads now.

But in the meantime here she was, parked up outside a secondary school where the slimmers’ meeting was due to take place, a mere fifteen miles down the road from where she’d spent the most miserable, frightening years of her life. It was a part of her past that she deliberately tried to shut down whenever her mind flickered in that direction, and now that she was here, so close to the area, she felt besieged by ambushes of memory that kept bursting through. The small terraced house. The smell of her ex-husband’s aftershave. The moment she’d woken up in hospital, bewildered and disorientated . . .

She shuddered there in the driver’s seat, feeling small and sad and vulnerable. Remembering how broken she’d been for a while, how she hadn’t been able to imagine a way through the darkness. Oh, help, this had been a mistake, she shouldn’t have let herself get talked into coming this far, she thought despairingly. Why had she allowed Margaret to bulldoze her into it, rather than listen to her own instincts?

She put her hand on the key, wondering if she should just turn it again, restart the engine, bail out with some excuse. She could blame a flat tyre, a sudden stomach bug that had erupted on the motorway; she remembered, from all the times she’d phoned in sick in the past, that if you went into enough graphic detail, people just said, ‘Okay, don’t worry about it’, simply to shut you up.

But then a smartly dressed woman walked through the car park, carrying a large bag as she headed for the school door, and Bunny knew this would be Sally Coles, her contact, who’d be leading the slimmers’ group; and – yes, right on cue – just as she was thinking this, the woman turned round, spotted her skulking in the car and changed direction. ‘Hello. You must be Bunny!’ she cried, as Bunny rolled down her window. ‘Excellent, you found us all right, then? We’re so looking forward to your talk. You’re an inspiration!’