Gunpowder Cottage. The pale cream of the chalkstone walls, burnished honey gold in the late, low sun, gave the house a timeless, ethereal appearance, as though it had been settled in the landscape forever. Lucy could almost hear the centuries whispering to her.

It was a beautiful place, but she’d rather be almost anywhere else in the world right now.

“It’s the perfect place for you to have a break,” her sister, Cleo, had said warmly, when she had rung to tell Lucy that she had arranged it all. “I’ve spoken to Aunt Verity and cleared it with the lettings agency. They’re not taking bookings at the moment because there’s some major work being done in the gardens. Aunty Verity did mention she might be heading back from Australia in a few weeks, but for now the place is all yours.”

Lucy hadn’t replied because there were tears crowding her throat, tears of combined guilt, gratitude and frustration. When she failed to speak, Cleo had continued breezily: “You don’t need to worry about a thing, Luce. All you have to do is rest.”

“Right,” Lucy had said. Then, thinking this sounded ungrateful, “Thank you, Cleo. You’re a star.”

“I know you’re not used to taking it easy,” Cleo said, a hint of reproach in her voice, “but this time you really are going to have to stop, Lucy.”

“Yeah,” Lucy said. Admitting the truth was hard, even to Cleo, especially to Cleo, perhaps, since normally Lucy was the organizer and her little sister was swept along in her wake. She could hear the subtext in Cleo’s words, the echoes of friends and family:

“Poor Lucy, she’s such a workaholic, so driven... No life outside of her music... What will she do now?”

It was a good question. Lucy didn’t know the answer. Not yet. She hadn’t even really accepted the reality of it yet, how a month of pneumonia and the complications that had followed it had ended her musical career so brutally. Her entire life plan had been derailed by a jumped-up flu virus.

“New talent Lucy Brown lights up the Barbican concert hall,” one review had said, a week after she had been hospitalized. “The new Benedetti!” another raved. “Full of promise. We can’t wait to hear more from the London Gala Orchestra’s new star...”

But there would be no more violin solos and the critics would forget her soon enough because there was always someone else coming up through the ranks. Meanwhile she had to get over it and get on with her life.

Lucy set her hand to the latch of the gate. The now-familiar twinge of pain shot up her arm, and she gritted her teeth against it. The illness had left her with a legacy of fatigue, aching joints and muscles, breathlessness, a whole shopping list of problems that were unfamiliar and exhausting. To start with she had tried to return to rehearsals but the excruciating pain had changed music from being a sublime pleasure to a painful trial. In the end she’d been forced to admit defeat and had cried with fury and frustration.