She shook her head in amazement, mouth agape. ‘Seriously, Jared? What part of the-man-I’ve-been-having-an-affair-with-coming-to-supper-with-my-husband would I be OK with?’ She took a breath. ‘You’ll have to cry off.’

Jared shrugged. ‘I get where you’re coming from.’ He took a sip of his coffee and pulled a face, set the cup down again. ‘But if you’re worried I’m going to blab at supper, you must know I’m not.’

She wanted to beat him over the head and scream in his face till he understood. ‘You can’t come to our house, Jared,’ she said, her voice breaking with the effort not to attack him physically, but still sharp with anguish. ‘You can’t be mates with Devan … or any of my friends. And you can’t be living five minutes from my door.’ She took a breath, trying to control her leaping heartbeat. ‘I don’t want to ever see you again.’ She spoke in a low hiss, although the girl who had served Jared was nowhere to be seen. ‘Do you understand?’

Jared looked genuinely shocked. He frowned. ‘Connie …’

Driving home her advantage, she leaned across the table, glaring into his eyes. ‘I AM NOT GOING TO LEAVE DEVAN.’

He held up his hands, as if to fend off her words. ‘OK, OK, no need to shout. I hear you.’ But his expression was bewildered.

‘You say that every bloody time. You keep saying it, but you aren’t listening. You just carry on like you did before, turning up and doing exactly the same thing. Which means exactly what you want.’

‘You used to want it too,’ he said, almost flirtatiously.

Connie growled in frustration, throwing herself back in the wooden chair. ‘I know I did,’ she said softly.

Jared seemed to be waiting for her to go on.

‘I don’t want to live without you in my life, Connie,’ he said, when she didn’t say anything more.

A shiver of dread shot through her at his words. She felt she was pounding on a hamster wheel, going round and round and coming back to exactly the same horrifying place. But she could think of nothing to say that might halt the wheel. She had assured her sister that Jared appeared perfectly normal to Devan and Neil and his new friends in the village. But the look in his eyes right now, as he singularly failed to accept what she was telling him, seemed off-the-scale delusional. Exhaustion overwhelmed her. She felt too tired to argue any more.

Jared was smiling now, his face relaxed. ‘Trust me, Connie. You have to trust me. I’d never do anything I thought might hurt you.’

As they got up, she remembered something. ‘So did you really work with Fiona Raven?’

‘Of course. We did some stuff on kitchens together, a while back.’

‘“Stuff”?’

‘She wanted to include kitchen design and how it works in one of her books.’