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Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
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London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018
Copyright © Hannah Begbie 2018
Cover design: Claire Ward © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018
Cover photograph © Trevor Payne / Trevillion Images
Hannah Begbie asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008283230
Ebook Edition © July 2018 ISBN: 9780008283247
Version: 2018-06-26
For Tom, my North Star
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
About the Author
About the Publisher
We were a normal family for exactly twenty-five days.
On the second day we brought her home from the hospital in a car seat. We put it down on the black-and-white weave of the living room rug and Dave said, ‘I feel like I can breathe again.’ Because for most of the pregnancy it was like we had held our breaths.
‘Dave, come on. She’s almost asleep.’ My smile was fading but his was wide and bright like a row of circus bulbs and part of me thought, let him just enjoy it.
‘BABY!’
His volume made me flinch. ‘Dave, please stop.’
‘What? Come on! Mia is here!’
Mia. Found on page 89 of The Great Big Book of Baby Names and circled like a bingo number. He kissed me on the forehead and I smiled for him. I kissed Mia and there we were, connected in a Russian doll of kisses. What a lovely family, someone looking on might have said.
‘It’s all right,’ he whispered. ‘Nothing’s going to get us now.’
And I believed him. I really think I did.
It was the kind of summer where everyone knew it was going to be a good one, right from the first days of the end of spring. The week she was born, the doorbell rang twice a day with deliveries of fresh-baked muffins, wrapped packages of soft toys, and cards printed with storks, peppered with sequins.
Mum, my sister Caroline, Dave’s mum. Our house seemed constantly full of people making the tea, padding in and out of the living room in their socks holding plates of cake, burbling their news. I would look up occasionally, to make a show of listening, but she was always there, cradled in my arms – a tiny person wrapped warm and safe in blankets, peacefully living out her first days in soft, new skin that shone like crushed diamonds.
I am lucky, I thought, in the mornings, as Mum emptied the dishwasher and waxed lyrical about the church pews being cleaned with an alternative furniture polish that had
