It was not something her family did around the kitchen table: talk about Shakespeare. But that was what he did: he turned her into a different person, a better person. That was the thing about Digby: at twenty-two, he wasn’t only handsome – beautiful in fact, with short, dark-red hair, long eyelashes, perfect teeth and wide, cat-like eyes – but he was also smart. Not country-smart, like the boys she knew, but book-smart, and able to quote Thomas Hardy and Shakespeare. For a girl like her, who had hated every second of school, feeling the confinement of the classroom like a weight and preferring to run and jump in and out of rock pools rather than sit with a book in her hand, his learning was impressive. Sometimes, as she stared at his face, she couldn’t understand why someone as fabulous as him was interested in someone like her.

They sat in the place where they liked to meet at the end of the day, weather permitting, where the ocean was their television, the clifftop their playground and the cawing gulls the only company they needed. As ever, it felt daring to be on the edge of the grass with the waves smashing against the jagged rocks below, watching the last of the sun sink over the brow of the horizon, covering their world in a fiery glaze.

‘I love you, Merrin.’ He ran his fingers over the inside of her arm.

It might have been the thousandth time he had said it to her, yet still she loved to hear it; his words lit sparks within her as well as offering much-needed reassurance.

‘I love you too.’ The acknowledged truth filled her with tiny firecrackers of joy.

‘I meant what I said: I want to be with you all the time.’ He kissed her and then held her in the way that told her he needed her, his grasp tight, his heartbeat steady and his mouth on the skin of her neck, desperate and seeking.

‘Me too.’

‘I’ve been thinking.’ He paused and pulled away. ‘I don’t know how to say it.’

‘You can say anything to me; you know that.’

‘Okay. I want . . .’ he faltered. ‘I want us to get married.’

Merrin laughed, loudly and without restraint, throwing her thick, tawny hair back over her shoulder and giggling until she ran out of breath.

‘You are joking?’