As she pulled out of the driveway she wondered who had been calling. Harry, probably. Most likely he’d want to tell her he wouldn’t be back for dinner, even though as he walked out the door that morning he had promised her he’d be back by six. Janie glanced at her mobile phone, considering that if it was Harry, he’d surely ring her on that; then she wondered if she cared if he was late anyway, because it only meant she wouldn’t bother making anything more than beans on toast and she could eat with the kids. She’d only just got the salmon out of the freezer. She could put it back in again before it defrosted.

Jesus, was that really what occupied her mind these days? she thought as she drove through the much quieter lanes of Beaulieu. For a moment Janie allowed herself to be relieved by the serenity, as her mindfulness teacher had been instructing her to, and for a brief five minutes she felt like it might actually work.

In the early days of moving to the New Forest, five years ago, the solitude had hit Janie hard. It was a stark contrast to the high-powered job and life in London she’d left behind, but then she’d told herself this was exactly what they needed. And yet her head was used to be being busy, a multitude of things running through it at any one time, and what she had found when she first moved to the south was that the peace gave her the space to think about things that were probably more important. And if she was honest with herself, she didn’t particularly want to do that.

When the girls started at the private primary school nearby, Janie had flung herself into anything she could find, regardless of whether it was entirely up her street. Over the last five years she had dedicated her time to PTA meetings and bake-sales, which gradually gave way to ridiculously unfounded ideas that she should do courses in creative writing and basket-weaving, and eventually settled on coffee mornings with her friends, yoga and golf and generally living her life through her daughters.

No one could tell Janie she didn’t keep herself busy. What she didn’t admit was that there was busy and there was busy, and while she might have been running around like a headless chicken, she could never say it was satisfying, because she wasn’t even using five per cent of her potential.

But that had been the choice she had made. Moving south meant giving up her career and devoting her time to raising two girls, just as her mum had always told her she should.