But that wasn’t the point. It just meant she didn’t have any excuses to fall back on.

After forty years, she owed him the truth, even if he’d never given her the same courtesy.

‘I’m not staying, Hugh, because I’m done with this. With Aldermere, with us – with you.’ Oh, it felt good to have those words out. To feel the freedom flooding in to fill the places where the pain had lived.

‘You don’t love me anymore.’ Hugh’s words were slow but sure.

‘I don’t.’ I’m sorry. She withheld the last two, automatic words. She didn’t owe him an apology for her feelings. ‘Goodbye, Hugh.’

He grabbed her arm. ‘Forty years, and that’s all I get? My life fell apart last night, Rosalind! Even as a friend, you should be standing by me.’

‘We were never friends, Hugh,’ she said, tiredly. ‘And to be honest, after all these years, I’ve had enough of you telling me what I should do.’

She looked up to see Caro and Posy emerging from the front door of Aldermere House, descending the steps to the driveway. Libby, she knew from DCI Larch, was long gone.

She wondered what Lettice Davenport’s legacy would be, once it finally fell into Libby’s hands. She couldn’t know for sure, but it gave her a hopeful feeling.

Aldermere, the old stories, were crumbling. Dahlia Lively was stepping out of the ruins and into the twenty-first century. Starting with Libby’s new script, and Posy’s new film.

‘Are you ready, Rosalind?’ Posy called. ‘The car to the station is here.’

‘Goodbye, Hugh,’ she whispered again, and he dropped her arm.

Rosalind strode across the driveway towards Caro and Posy.

‘Everything okay there?’ Caro asked, with a surprising level of tact, for her.

‘It will be,’ Rosalind replied. ‘For now, at least. My secrets will be all over the papers in no time, but yours are still out there somewhere too.’

Caro shrugged philosophically. ‘Now Marcus is dead, I suspect the general public is even less interested in my historical sex life than before.’

Rosalind looked to Posy, and spotted the small frown line between her eyebrows. ‘I don’t think Anton will make my photos public, not without risking his own career. But even if they did get out … perhaps it wouldn’t be the end of the world.’

‘Not if we handled it right,’ Caro agreed, and Rosalind smiled at her assumption that they’d deal with it together. The three Dahlias.

‘Maybe it could be an opportunity,’ Posy went on. ‘A chance to show people that change is a process, and we’re always changing. That a setback isn’t a failure, and it doesn’t mean you can’t move forward again.’