Though years had passed he was still with her every moment. It tended to be only the good things she remembered. His laugh, the dimple on his left cheek when he smiled, the muscles on his chest that were covered in a fine down of strawberry-blonde hair she liked to kiss, the taste of fresh sweat on his skin. She looked out of the car window. Focused on the sea in the distance, hazy with the promise of rain on the horizon. The things that had driven her mad about him, made her scream with anger and frustration, had faded. They’d become irrelevant. How she regretted the arguments over silly things of no consequence. Who cared whose turn it was to put the bins out when all that mattered was pressing her lips to his downy chest?

She leant her head against the passenger side window and watched The Cliff House retreating in the wing mirror. Such a ridiculous house, brash and shining white, all straight lines and huge windows, as conspicuous as a chalk carving on a grassy hillside. Her house would have fitted into it five times over and it wasn’t even the Davenports’ main home. When Angie had gone for an interview for the cleaning position, Eleanor Davenport told her their ‘principle residence’ was in somewhere called Holland Park. She said it as if Angie should have known where that was. She didn’t but she nodded anyway, just in case not knowing where Holland Park was could cost her the job.

‘It was nice last night.’ Gareth’s voice cut into her thoughts. She pulled her head away from the window and looked at him. He glanced at her with a shy smile.

‘It was.’

‘Can I take you out again tonight?’

‘Oh, well, I was thinking… I might have a night in.’

‘Because of the kids?’

She recalled Tamsyn’s disapproval, the hurt in her eyes, looking more like Rob than she’d ever done before.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m tired. That’s all. I’d planned a bit of telly in my pyjamas.’

Gareth dropped his head like a child who’d been told Christmas was cancelled.

Angie suspected he knew she was lying. That it was, as he guessed, because of her children. He would never be able to understand how hard it was for them. They only knew their own grief. For them Rob could never be replaced. That was all they could see. They were blinkered. They could never appreciate how lonely she was. How lying in her foldaway bed in the sitting room, the silence echoing in her head like funeral bells night after night after night, was eating away at her. Cutting her adrift on a lonely piece of wreckage.

They pulled up outside her house and Gareth stilled the engine.

‘Thanks for the lift.’

‘No problem.’