Realizing she was wasting a day inside when the sun was gently warming everything, she decided to make the most of it. Changing into an old bikini she’d bought when she’d taken Becky on her first holiday, she dragged the moth-eaten sun-lounger cushion from under the stairs, and took her sunglasses, a lemonade and her still-unfinished book out into the tiny garden.

The weather was glorious and after a few minutes she put the book down and closed her eyes. Her skin felt warm and caressed. She could feel herself dozing, the sounds from the world outside fading as she drifted off: distant traffic, shouts and laughter from some young people from the college, a grass-cutting machine in the local park at the end of the road. She listened to the thrum of the engine as it got closer and then faded away again as it turned and headed in the opposite direction. She was almost asleep when it returned for its next loop and she found herself getting irritated at it for preventing her from napping. Such an incessant noise. It was getting louder and louder as it approached. Familiar. The noise mentally poking her: you remember me. Round and round, up and down. Grace’s back garden. A tractor looping the field again and again. She suddenly opened her eyes. A weird thought.

The farm.

The tractor.

The crop-spraying. The smell. The headaches.

Kate sat up. It couldn’t be. Could it?

She went back inside to her computer and typed ‘crop-spraying in the countryside’ into the search engine. Boom – there it was. Article upon article staring her in the face:

Crop Sprays Damage Health

Pesticides Campaign

Links Between Herbicides and Cancer

It went on and on. There were pages of them.

‘I know it’s quite late,’ said Kate as Grace opened the front door, surprised to see her.

‘The boys are outside,’ said Grace, and Kate waved through to Arnie and John playing football in the garden. ‘Time for a coffee?’

‘Love one.’ As Kate waited, she was drawn towards the open patio doors, and watched the twins play in the garden. On the other side of the chain-link fence was the field. There was no buffer, nothing to protect them. The spray would come right into the garden, most likely up to the house, carried on any breeze. This would happen again and again, every time the tractor did a loop of the field. And how many times a year? Fifteen? Twenty? And that wasn’t the only field – there were acres of them.

‘Thanks,’ she said as a mug was handed to her.

‘It’s especially beautiful at this time,’ said Grace, looking outside. ‘Evenings growing lighter and the crops still new.’ She smiled. ‘So, what brings you here? Did you find Becky’s article? Double-page spread on how I swapped a career in accounting for making dodgy Swiss rolls?’

Kate didn’t answer straight away. She didn’t know how to, what to say. She was beginning to wonder if she had made a mistake coming, but then . . . if what she thought was true, how could she not say anything? Grace was looking at her expectantly.