Merrin stared at the sandy ground, wishing she could fall into it, away from prying eyes and tattling tongues. She felt small.

‘The tide will change!’ The words boomed loudly, coming from behind her.

She looked around and into the face of the sad, scuttling form of Lizzie Lick – not her real name, but how all the locals knew her – coming up from the foreshore. Her hand was wedged in her mouth as if it were a shock to her that she had spoken out of turn or too loudly.

‘She licks the windows of parked cars, no one knows why . . .’

‘She used to be a lawyer who went mad and now lives in a cave.’

‘I heard she went to prison . . . why would they send an innocent woman to prison? They wouldn’t, would they?’

‘I heard it was murder . . ..’

The rumours surrounding Lizzie were as fanciful as they were numerous. But Merrin knew the sad truth.

And now as she rushed home to stand by the front door with her wedding day in tatters, she realised they were right, all of them. Her dad in his assumption that Digby was an idiot, her mum with all her reservations about the boy, and even Ruby, who had quite rightly seen that Digby didn’t have it in him.

‘How stupid are you, Merrin?’ she whispered. ‘You should have listened to them.’

Walking slowly into the cottage, she found her mum and dad sitting on the little sofa in front of the fireplace. Her mum was already in her nightclothes and her dad had changed out of the suit he hated and had wasted money on, the suit Mrs Mortimer had insisted on the whole wedding party wearing.

‘We can’t have a mismatched wedding party, that would simply not do!’ Her voice was more like nails on a chalkboard in the remembering.

‘We were just starting to get a bit worried. I was going to come looking for you,’ her dad breathed. He had dark circles under his eyes and furrows of anxiety on his brow.

‘I’m okay,’ she lied. ‘Well, not okay exactly, but home.’

‘I can imagine your head is all of a dither.’ Her dad looked close to tears for all she had had to experience.

‘Just a bit.’ She swallowed at the understatement. ‘Mum always said that when it came to love I would just know when it was right . . . and I knew, or at least I thought I did.’

Ben looked at his wife sharply, seemingly lost for answers, and Merrin saw the frustration in it. Her mum looked at the floor.