I stem my tears as we stand at the graveside while Adam is lowered into his final resting place. I just need to hold it together for a little longer but the world is spinning. I feel my knees buckle and, if it weren’t for Nell and Josh, I would fall.

‘I’ll always catch you, Anna,’ Adam had said. But he isn’t catching me now and suddenly I hate him for leaving me, and then I hate myself for feeling that way.

‘Anna,’ Nell whispers. I am offered a red rose from a bucket; I’d chosen not to have soil. Heat spreads through me as I fight the urge to tip the flowers on the grass – if we don’t pay our last respects to Adam, surely they can’t fill in his grave?

‘You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to,’ Josh says, but today I am doing everything I don’t want to.

I am letting go of the man I love.

My face is fire. Tears burning behind my eyes, pressure building in my nose. My forehead throbbing with the emotion I’m trying to contain.

Slowly, reluctantly, I unhook my arm from Josh’s and I pluck a rose from the bucket and step forward, holding it between my fingers.

‘Be free.’ I let the flower fall as I say goodbye to my husband, to Harry, to the life we almost had.

To all of it.

I stuff my hands into my pockets, rooted to the spot, unwilling to leave him. In my pocket I find a coin. I pull it out. It’s the coin. My grandad’s. I hadn’t remembered putting it in my coat and, after running my finger over it one last time, I kiss it and let it fall into the grave.

I’ll be thinking of you, Adam. Always.

It is when I turn away that the circling thought that there is something I need to remember stills and becomes as clear as the bright blue sky.

The day Adam died, before he took the fateful yacht trip for the second time, he had scrawled an address on a notepad. An address I can’t clearly remember.

It was a message for me. It must have been.

But what?

Chapter Seventy-Eight

Anna

The wake is held in The Star. I haven’t been here for years. Adam would be pleased to know they still have the same pool tables. I step inside onto the forever-sticky floor and it feels like stepping back in time. Dark wooden beams striping the ceiling. Round mahogany tables wobble on spindly legs.

I hover uncertainly by the bar, unsure of what my place is here. What I am supposed to do. Both unwilling and unable to mingle and join one of the conversations that are too loud. Too jolly. Voices dripping with relief that the ceremony is over, and laughter. People are laughing.