But you’re not staying, said a voice in her head. Especially not now. Not with the baby on the way. How would that work, in the Fishergirl’s Luck?

‘Why don’t you and Frank come to me for dinner later?’ she said. ‘It’ll save you having to think about it if you spend all day sorting out the rental.’

Later, Anna used the antibiotics excuse as a reason for not taking a glass of red with their spaghetti bolognese, glad and guilty in equal measure that neither of her friends questioned it any more than they had her excuse of having a bad back. She didn’t like lying to Pat and Frank any more than she had liked lying to Rhona, and wondered how long she could hold out before telling her friends the true reason for her abstinence.

For the next two weeks she saw neither Liam Harper nor either of the MacKenzies, partly by design and partly because she was so genuinely busy. Anna happily sunk herself into work. The demand for lunch at the Fishergirl’s Luck was so great that for the first week she ended up opening the bench on Thursday as well as Friday and Saturday, and on the second she added Wednesday as well.

‘I’ve honestly never seen the village so busy, love,’ Frank told her. ‘It’s obviously not a coincidence. You’d think we were Pennan, the number of people wandering about and taking photographs!’

By the time the second week came around, queues for the bench were already forming by 11.30 a.m., and by 11.50 the space Anna had available was full.

‘You should add another bench,’ said one frustrated customer. ‘This is the third day we’ve tried to get a seat.’

‘There’s still the Inn, you know,’ Phil reminded her, as he was passing and saw her in action as she was serving the mains on Saturday afternoon. ‘I think it’s clear now that you’d be more than capable of taking on the challenge and making it work.’

The thought was a pleasant one, and Anna realized that cooking at the Fishergirl’s Luck had given her a new level of confidence in her own abilities. It made her wonder what she could have achieved in her life already if she hadn’t been under Geoff’s thumb for so long.

‘Do you know who owns the Inn?’ she asked Frank a few days later. ‘Is there someone I could talk to about it, do you think?’

Frank’s face, which had seemed to Anna to have taken on a greyish pall since the last storm, brightened. ‘That sounds as if you’re thinking of ways to stay here permanently!’

‘Not seriously,’ she said, keen to nip any gossip in the bud. ‘Don’t mention it to anyone, please.’