Cover

About the Author

Hilary Boyd was a nurse, marriage counsellor and ran a small cancer charity before becoming an author. She has written eight books, including Thursdays in the Park, her debut novel which sold over half a million copies and was an international bestseller.

Dedication

To my dear friend Suzie, with love

Epigraph

A happy marriage is the union of two good forgivers

Robert Quillen

1

Connie McCabe was an honest woman. At least, she’d always considered herself as such. It wasn’t something she prided herself on: it was just her default position, as another person’s might be to slide away from the truth when it didn’t suit them. But she was never brutal – if asked her opinion of a friend’s new dress, she wouldn’t say, ‘That yellow makes you look as if your liver’s packed up,’ when the friend was stuck in the outfit for the foreseeable. So the events of that summer shocked Connie to the core and made her question everything she thought she knew about herself.

On the 2 p.m. xxx, Connie texted her husband, Devan. They lived in a large village – almost a small town, or ‘tillage’, as the locals referred to it – south of the Mendips, on the Somerset Levels, and her train journey, starting from Paddington, would take close to three hours.

See you at the station x, Devan replied.

She sat back in the crowded carriage, the heating turned up way too high for the mild April day, and closed her eyes, letting out a luxurious sigh of relief. For the past ten days she’d been on call, responsible for thirty-nine people’s welfare – one passenger had cried off sick at the last minute – on a rail journey through the tulip fields of Holland. According to company guidelines, it was frowned upon to read or listen to anything – heaven forbid snooze – while accompanying her passengers across Europe. She should stay alert, poised to deal with any concerns her flock might have. So, despite loving every minute of her job as a tour manager, just sitting here, alone, with no responsibility to anyone but herself, was bliss.

Connie felt herself begin to unwind as the train travelled west, past Reading and Swindon, the countryside awash with bright blossoms and deliciously pale spring green. It had been a good tour. Only one really irritating couple who’d picked holes in everything, from the pillows to the narrow steam-train seats and rain on the day they’d toured Amsterdam. She’d been waiting for them to kick off about the colours of the spectacular tulip displays. There was always one.