As a result, property prices had begun to climb, and new people were moving to town. The downside to this was that the once-quiet village was changing. It looked the same, with verandah-lined shops running along both sides of the wide main street, but there was a very different vibe about the place. Where Elle once knew every face in town, nowadays, more often than not she could walk into a shop and not recognise a single person. It wasn’t like newcomers were overrunning the place, but it was still strange, and a lot of the older residents were finding it a tad confronting.

Elle turned her old VW Beetle into the carpark at the back of the independent supermarket and headed inside to work.

‘Morning, Elle,’ Pat called as Elle walked past with a smile.

Pat was in her late fifties and had been working in Brown’s Grocer ever since she left school. She was about as permanent a fixture as the business itself. She was also the example Elle’s parents liked to use whenever they tried to discuss their daughter’s future … or lack of one.

‘Do you want to end up like Patricia Adams?’

Elle didn’t think ending up like Pat was the worst thing that could happen to a person. Pat was single, she had a steady job and a cat she adored, and everyone loved her. But to Caroline and Alister Kinnaird, it was a fate worse than death; to them, Pat was a lonely old spinster who had never left Jessup’s Creek and was doomed to die alone alongside her cat.

Caroline and Alister were a Jessup’s Creek success story. They were high-school sweethearts who left town to go to university. Alister became a doctor and Caroline an accountant. They married and returned to their hometown to set up businesses and raise a family.

They’d had three perfect children who followed in their footsteps: first Lauren, who went into law; then Lachlan, an engineer; and Malcolm, who was studying biomedical science … and then there was Elspeth. She had never really fitted into the family mould. For starters, she was the only redhead. It was some kind of throwback, apparently. Gran had always said Elle was lucky—that inheriting her Scottish genes was a blessing—but as a kid Elle considered her red hair and freckles a curse. She was so different to her siblings that growing up she often wondered when her parents would sit her down and break the news that she was adopted. They never did, and now that she was twenty-four she assumed they would have done it by now if they were ever going to.