Tully opened her mouth, but Heather held up a hand, stopping her.

‘Listen. I know how it feels to doubt myself. But I’m done with that now. And, honestly? I think the money in the hot-water bottle meant Pam was done doubting herself, too.’

She was getting through to them now, Heather could feel it. She walked over and stood in front of them, so they were in a small triangle. ‘The last thing she would’ve wanted was to pass on her doubt to you two.’

‘She’s right,’ Rachel said. ‘Mum would hate us doubting ourselves.’

‘It’s time to start trusting our instincts,’ Tully agreed.

Heather nodded. They had to start trusting their instincts.

What choice did they have? It wasn’t as if they could ask Pam.

EPILOGUE

PAMELA

Three years earlier . . .

Pamela counted out the money. Ninety-seven thousand, three hundred and seventy-two dollars.

‘Thanks, Mum,’ she said out loud.

Obviously her mother couldn’t hear her. Two days ago, Pam had got the phone call from her in the hospital. A suspected heart attack, Mum had said gravely, explaining that she’d been taken by ambulance to the hospital. Pam was fumbling for her keys, ready to drive to the hospital, when her mother added, ‘Oh, Pammy? Can you swing by my place and grab my hot-water bottle on the way?’

Pam hesitated. ‘I can probably find a hot-water bottle here somewhere . . .’

‘No,’ her mother said firmly. ‘I need my hot-water bottle. It’s important, Pammy.’

Her mother provided instructions for where she would find it. At the back of the wardrobe, behind the shoes. When Pam brought it to her mother’s bedside, her mother showed her its contents.

‘A hundred thousand dollars?’ Pam cried. ‘Mum, where did you get a hundred thousand dollars?’

Mum explained that for years she’d been withdrawing her pension money each week and hiding the cash in the hot-water bottle.

When Pam asked why, she explained that if the government saw she wasn’t spending it all, they’d reduce the amount she received.

Turned out her mother was quite the pension fraudster.

‘What if you’d died and never told me?’ Pam asked.

‘Then the people cleaning out the house would have got a nice surprise.’

Pam had brought the hot-water bottle home and put it in her bedside drawer for safekeeping until her mum got out of hospital. But her mother had died that morning of another heart attack. So now, she supposed, the money was hers.

Pam wondered what she would do with all this money. What would Mum have wanted her to do?

Mum was always telling Pam that she needed to get away, unwind, take a break from her life. Perhaps she and Stephen could go to one of those health retreats? One with facials and massages. She could use a massage. Lately her body hurt all the time. One too many falls, she suspected. She was always tripping here, or stumbling there.

A few weeks ago at book club, she’d commented on her aches and pains, and all the ladies had agreed. Old age, they said. Menopause, someone else chimed in. But afterward, as she helped herself to Mary’s Black Forest cake, Diana Rothschild had made a comment that rankled Pam.