Gayle seemed very pleased with the praise and puffed up a little. ‘The man I got to do it even used his computer to do some tidying up. It was so clever! Richard and I have had one blown up to go in the living room, with a lovely frame.’

Anna looked down at her gift and felt stupidly proud when she realized Gayle had chosen a solo shot of Spencer from their wedding album. However, as she continued to study the picture on the table in front of her, a cold feeling crept into her stomach. She knew every photograph in her wedding album intimately, so of course she recognized this particular shot. But there was something different, something off.

Little Spencer started to stir, and Teresa stood and picked him up, rocking him, while she and Gayle began a discussion about whether the two brothers had looked more like each other when they were younger or as they’d grown older. Anna cocked her head to one side, squinting slightly. What was it that wasn’t quite right…? Was there something missing? It was like trying to thread a needle without her reading glasses on.

And then it hit her.

It was her.

She was the thing that was missing from the photograph.

She jumped to her feet, spilling milky coffee not only all down her cream blouse but also over her dead husband’s smiling face.

This hadn’t been a solo portrait of Spencer on their wedding day, one taken by his best man before the service. It had been one of her and Spencer together after the ceremony. Look, there was the proof: a couple of pastel flakes of confetti still resting on his shoulder.

‘Tidying up,’ Gayle had said. Photoshopping is what she’d meant.

She’d had Anna airbrushed out of the picture.

ANNA SLAMMED HER front door behind her and marched up the stairs. She wasn’t heading to Camber Sands. Not yet, anyway. There were a couple of things she needed to do first after that horrendous bloody lunch.

She walked into her bedroom, stripped off her coffee-stained blouse and threw it on the floor, then went to the wardrobe. Not hers but Spencer’s. She opened the door and slid the first shirt her fingers found off its hanger. It was the one she’d bought him a few summers ago, white collarless linen. She pulled it on over her bra, then turned and headed back downstairs.

This was all Gayle’s fault! That woman had spoiled everything. Yet again.

And there was no way Anna was going to another Sunday lunch, not in the history of this universe. Which was just as well, seeing as she probably wasn’t welcome at Gayle and Richard’s anymore, anyway.

She was about to head out back to her car, where her suitcase waited for her, but as she strode across the hall, she turned on her heel and changed direction, making a beeline for the kitchen. She opened the freezer and crouched down so she could pull out the bottom drawer, where all the items past their best-before dates and crusty with frost ended up. Her fingers closed around a medium-sized Tupperware box and she pulled it out. The contents rustled and rattled slightly. The sound both infuriated and thrilled her.