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Chapters (64)
  1. Cover
  2. Dedication
  3. Prologue
  4. Five Years Later
  5. One
  6. Two
  7. Three
  8. Four
  9. Five
  10. Six
  11. Seven
  12. Eight
  13. Nine
  14. Ten
  15. Eleven
  16. Twelve
  17. Thirteen
  18. Fourteen
  19. Fifteen
  20. Sixteen
  21. Seventeen
  22. Eighteen
  23. Nineteen
  24. Twenty
  25. Twenty-one
  26. Twenty-two
  27. Twenty-three
  28. Twenty-four
  29. Twenty-five
  30. Twenty-six
  31. Twenty-seven
  32. Twenty-eight
  33. Twenty-nine
  34. Thirty
  35. Thirty-one
  36. Thirty-two
  37. Thirty-three
  38. Thirty-four
  39. Thirty-five
  40. Thirty-six
  41. Thirty-seven
  42. Thirty-eight
  43. Thirty-nine
  44. Forty
  45. Forty-one
  46. Forty-two
  47. Forty-three
  48. Forty-four
  49. Forty-five
  50. Forty-six
  51. Forty-seven
  52. Forty-eight
  53. Forty-nine
  54. Fifty
  55. Fifty-one
  56. Fifty-two
  57. Fifty-three
  58. Fifty-four
  59. Fifty-five
  60. Epilogue
  61. Acknowledgements
  62. Canelo Crime
  63. About the Author
  64. Also by Sheila Bugler

Clodagh had barely slept on Tuesday night. Her mind wouldn’t switch off. She kept going back over the interview in the police station, wondering if she could have handled things better. She had lied to the police. What the hell had she been thinking? She hadn’t been thinking, that was the problem. She had been utterly unprepared going into that interview. The person she’d been before the crash wouldn’t have let herself get tripped up like that.

It hadn’t helped that Adam had come back from London in an ebullient mood yesterday evening. His new TV programme had been given the green light. Filming was due to start over the coming weeks. He’d droned on about it for hours, Clodagh doing her best to pretend to share his excitement until it was late enough for her to feign tiredness and slip away to bed. She’d lain awake most of the night, drifting into an uneasy sleep as the first fingers of daylight started trickling through the curtains. She dreamed of being in a plane that was falling to the ground, people screaming all around her and Vivienne’s face, white with fear, as she tried to tell Clodagh something. But Clodagh couldn’t hear her, and when she tried to reach out for Vivienne, her sister’s face disappeared.

She woke up, confused and disorientated, forgetting for a moment where she was. Gradually, the familiar shapes and shadows of the room came into focus, birdsong in the garden replacing the nightmare sounds from the dream. She lay in bed, waiting for the last of the dream to fade before throwing the quilt back and getting up.

Standing under the pounding water, she put her hands across her stomach, imagining the baby growing there. Trying to work out how she felt about it. She’d never given much thought to having children, apart from assuming – in a vague way – that it would probably happen one day. When she was ready for it.

As she dried herself after the shower, she wondered if now might not be the right time. The decision to leave her old life behind and move in with Adam had seemed so easy at first. But recently, she’d started to feel something was missing. She was bored. She’d tried to rationalise it. Told herself it was natural to be bored when she didn’t have a job and mostly spent her days waiting for Adam to finish work so they could spend some time together. But deep down, she knew it wasn’t that simple. She was starting to suspect there was something fundamentally wrong with their relationship.