It was a year now since Merrin had arrived in Thornbury and yet there were still mornings when she woke and it took a second for her to remember where she was. The bed in her room was wide and comfortable, the carpet soft, the view lovely, and yet she would wake with a start, her breath coming quickly and tears trickling from her eyes.

It was almost instinctive, this mourning for the place she had lived her whole life. Especially on days like this when she had dreamt of Port Charles. She had been sitting on the embroidered cushion in the window seat, the sound of gulls filling the air while her dad whistled in the little bathroom at the back of the lean-to and her mum fried eggs on the range. It was revisiting this beloved normality in sleep that made waking hardest to bear. It wasn’t that life here in Thornbury was desperate or that she was sad all the time, far from it, but still, to survive the day she had to shake thoughts of the harbourside from her mind and forge on.

Her telephone buzzed with an incoming call from Bella.

‘Bit early for you?’ she yawned.

‘Bit late, actually, haven’t been to bed yet!’

She could tell by her friend’s excited tone that this fact was a cause for celebration.

‘Hmm, so you’ve either got yourself a job with a nightshift or you met a man; let me guess . . .’ If things were different and she was living happily in Kellow Cottages, then Bella would right about now be knocking on her front door and they would be sharing this news face to face and, more than likely, she would have been present when her best friend had actually met this man and would therefore be part of the story. And that really summed up what it was like to live away: she felt like she was no longer part of the story. Excluded. Written out.

‘Oh, my God, Merry, he’s gorgeous!’

She dug deep to find a smile, not wanting to taint her friend’s lovely news with her own melancholy. ‘Gorgeous-looking or gorgeous person?’

‘Both! He’s Dutch, tall, a yachtie. He crews on fancy boats for people with too much money and too little time, takes them from port to port and then hops off when the owner arrives. Travels all over the world. And right now, luckily for me, he’s hopped off in Port Charles!’ Bella squealed her excitement.

‘Where did you meet him?’ She wanted the detail.

‘In the pub, where d’you think?’

Bella had a point.

‘What’s his name?’

‘Luuk, and he’s blonde and funny and laid back and—’

‘Steady there, Bells, it sounds like you’ve got it bad.’