I thought back to the conversation with Maren. ‘I guess you never know what goes on behind closed doors.’

‘What do you mean?’ she replied, quick as a flash.

I needed to be careful how I answered this. She was friends with Tom, and anything I said against him was probably going to filter back. ‘Oh, it’s just a general observation,’ I said, backpedalling as smoothly as a drunk clown on a unicycle. ‘You never really know someone. People can be struggling with their own issues behind what appears to be a perfectly wonderful life.’

‘True,’ she conceded.

‘So what brings you out here, then?’ I asked, giving the subject of Aurelia a wide berth. For the past few weeks Derry had seemed to just hang out at Granhus, her days carved up by a hectic schedule of yoga and meditation.

‘You mean, why would I come somewhere that has no cafés, restaurants, or yoga studios?’ she replied with a laugh, marching a few steps ahead. ‘Well, I’m freelance, so I’m pretty much able to take my work anywhere I please.’

‘You’re a writer?’ I asked. I’d seen her spend a number of afternoons scribbling into a notebook.

‘I’m a designer,’ she said. ‘But I do write now and then. Just as a hobby. I wrote a screenplay last year.’

‘Wow. A screenplay,’ I said. ‘That’s incredible.’

‘Thanks,’ she said, beaming. ‘I’d like to attempt a novel, but it seems too … Oh, I don’t know. I went on one of those week-long courses last summer. You know, where you stay with other writers in a big house and have lessons by published writers during the day?’

‘Oh yes,’ I said, though I’d never heard of such a thing.

‘Golly, it was terrific.’

‘Golly,’ I replied, because I wanted to try the word out, and I was sure Sophie was also the sort of person who said things like ‘golly’.

‘But I still haven’t managed to publish anything.’ Derry clocked my look of interest. ‘Do you write?’

I gave a sheepish smile. ‘I’m about halfway through a novel. About fifty thousand words in. It’s complete rubbish.’

Her eyes widened. ‘Fifty thousand? I think I managed twenty thousand on the novel I tried before I gave up. I just ran out of steam …’

‘Maybe we can critique each other’s work,’ I said. This was uncharacteristically bold of me, and I said it slightly under my breath, so that if she kicked back on the idea I could pretend I’d said something about the scenery, or put the suggestion down to lack of oxygen reaching my brain.