Okay, good. Anna released a shaky breath. Putting it in context like that helped. So what if it hadn’t all been a dream? That didn’t mean all of it had been real, either. It was probably a mixture of reality, imagination and emotion – that was what she was going to tell herself if she started freaking out about it again. And she would keep telling herself that all the way through lunch that afternoon.

Chapter Five

WHAT I COULD really do with, more than anything else, Anna thought, as she arrived at Spencer’s parents’ house and killed the engine, is a hug, plain and simple. She wished she were pulling up to her own parents’ house, that it was her mother who would dry her hands on a tea towel and come running to the front door to greet her, but that wasn’t possible. Not unless she wanted to jump on a plane and travel almost three thousand miles.

Her parents had moved to Canada not long after she and Spencer had married. Anna’s mother worked as a conference centre manager for an international chain of hotels, and the kind of position she’d been working towards her whole career had come up. The only snag? It was in Nova Scotia. Anna’s father had just retired from being a civil engineer, and their only child was settled, so they had taken the leap. The plan was to move back to the UK when her mum retired. Anna visited, of course, and they had Skype calls regularly, but it wasn’t quite the same. You couldn’t hug a screen.

Anna ran from her car and rang the Barrys’ front doorbell. Quarter past one. She’d never been this late before.

Gayle answered. She smiled at Anna, but there was a stiffness in her posture as she leaned in and kissed her briefly on the cheek. No hug was forthcoming. ‘You’re running a bit late,’ she said, taking in Anna’s woolly jumper and jeans, which were definitely not as smart as her usual family lunch attire, but Anna had barely had time to find anything clean, let alone iron anything.

‘Um… yes. Traffic was a bit bad.’ She nodded towards the rain, still falling in large, icy drops beyond the overhang of the porch.

‘Well, we managed to hold off a bit,’ Gayle said, opening the door wide. ‘But you’re here in the nick of time – we were just about to sit down.’ And she led the way through the house to the large dining room that overlooked the garden.

Spencer’s older brother, Scott, was already there, helping to carry covered dishes in from the kitchen. Anna always felt a little jab in her ribs every time she saw him. He looked so much like his younger sibling. Both boys had inherited their mother’s fair hair and blue eyes, although Spencer had always looked the more boyish. Scott’s features were sharper, his expression naturally more sombre.

He and his wife had announced just before Christmas that she was expecting their first child at the end of May. Teresa gave Anna a little nod as she arrived from the kitchen, carrying a dish full of stuffing balls. Anna couldn’t help looking at her stomach, trying to work out if there were the beginnings of a bump there under her loose top. While she was overjoyed for the couple, she felt a little flush of envy every time she thought about it.