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    Together, Again: tears, laughter, joy and hope from the much-loved Sunday Times bestselling author
    Together, Again: tears, laughter, joy and hope from the much-loved Sunday Times bestselling author
    Together, Again: tears, laughter, joy and hope from the much-loved Sunday Times bestselling author
    Ebook373 pages6 hours

    Together, Again: tears, laughter, joy and hope from the much-loved Sunday Times bestselling author

    By Milly Johnson

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    About this ebook

    THE NEW MILLY JOHNSON NOVEL, THE HAPPIEST EVER AFTER, IS OUT NOW!

    Together again after years apart, can they find a new beginning? The brilliant novel full of laughter, love, tears and hope from the Sunday Times bestselling author Milly Johnson.

    'This masterpiece honestly describes the strength and acceptance required to be a family. 5 STARS' ADELE PARKS, Book of the Month, Platinum magazine

    'Darkness and light, complexity and humour, Milly has nailed the perfect cocktail for a compelling, page-turning read. Absolutely magnificent.' VERONICA HENRY

    ‘Emotional, empowering and heart-wrenching – sisterhood at its finest’ CATHY BRAMLEY

    Sisters Jolene, Marsha and Annis have convened at their beautiful family home, Fox House, following the death of their mother, the tricky Eleanor Vamplew. Born seven years apart, the women are more strangers than sisters.

    Jolene, the eldest, is a successful romantic novelist who writes about beautiful relationships even though her own marriage to the handsome and charming Warren is complicated.

    Marsha, the neglected middle child, has put all of her energy into her work, hoping money will plug the gap in her life left by the man who broke her young heart.

    Annis is the renegade, who left home aged sixteen and never returned, not even for the death of their beloved father Julian. Until now.

    So when the sisters discover that their mother has left everything to Annis in her will, it undermines everything they thought they knew. Can saying their final goodbyes to Eleanor bring them together again?

    Together, Again is the story of truths uncovered and lies exposed, of secrets told – and kept. It is a novel about sister helping sister to heal from childhood scars and finding in each other support, forgiveness, courage and love.

    Your favourite authors love Milly Johnson:
     
    ‘Reading a Milly Johnson book is like spending time with a best friend – you always end up feeling better about the world. Written with genuine warmth and heart, they’re an absolute treat’ Lucy Diamond

    ‘Milly Johnson always delivers an absolutely cracking read’ Katie Fforde

    ‘One of those novels that draws you in to its world and makes you wish you could be friends with Shay. A tantalising juicy tale full of twists and turns that kept me gripped. Warm, funny and moving. One to curl up with and devour’ Ruth Jones

    ‘The feeling you get when you read a Milly Johnson book should be bottled and made available on the NHS’ Debbie Johnson

    ‘Milly’s writing is like getting a big hug with just the right amount of bite underneath’ Jane Fallon
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster UK
    Release dateSep 29, 2022
    ISBN9781471199059
    Together, Again: tears, laughter, joy and hope from the much-loved Sunday Times bestselling author
    Author

    Milly Johnson

    Milly Johnson was born, raised and still lives in Barnsley, South Yorkshire. A Sunday Times bestseller, she is one of the Top 10 Female Fiction authors in the UK, and has sold millions of copies of her books sold across the world. The Happiest Ever After is her twenty-first novel.    Milly’s writing highlights the importance of community spirit and the magic of kindness. Her books inspire and uplift but she packs a punch and never shies away from the hard realities of life and the complexities of relationships in her stories. Her books champion women, their strength and resilience, and celebrate love, friendship and the possibility and joy of second chances and renaissances. She writes stories about ordinary women and the extraordinary things that happen in their ordinary lives.

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    • 5/5
      The way the characters' lives were interwoven from living separate lives to ultimately becoming sisters of the heart.

    Book preview

    Together, Again - Milly Johnson

    Eleanor

    If you are reading this, then I am gone and you will probably be wondering why I have done what I have.

    I need to explain everything, I owe you that.

    I will entrust the delivery of this letter to Sally. I will stress that it is for your eyes only and I hope that curiosity will not overcome her. That would be a great shame because I have to write the truth, all of it and I can only guess at her reaction.

    I have had a lot of time on my hands in widowhood to reflect and I have learned so much about myself from doing that. I never realised I had a conscience, but I suppose I must have to feel compelled to write this. Whether that is a blessing or a curse, I have no idea. It feels like neither.

    Why now, you might ask, after all these years? Because I am frightened. Not of death – it will visit us all. But of meeting my maker with a heart burdened with so many unsaid words. I have had a warning that our meeting is closer than I anticipated and so it is imperative I act before it is too late. I must be at peace.

    Daughter, you must believe me when I tell you that I have tried over the years to feel like ‘normal’ people but it will come as no surprise to hear that outside your father, I am incapable of love…

    Chapter 1

    The girl they all knew as Mai walked down the stairs with her rucksack, carrier bag and pet transporter. There was a crescent of women waiting there, in various stages of upset ranging from silence to crying.

    ‘Aw, no,’ she said. ‘I wanted to slip away quietly.’

    ‘Not from us lot you’re not,’ said Denise, her boss of seven years, but also so much more.

    ‘We’ll miss you, Mai,’ said Velvet, one of her colleagues, tall, stunning, black with long blue hair, handing her a card in an envelope. ‘We’ve all written on it.’

    She opened it. There was a daiquiri cocktail on the front with a dodgy-looking half a banana stuck on the rim of the glass, two cherries at its base. It looked very genitalia-esque; deliberately, she thought.

    ‘Will you come back and visit?’ said Shirley. ‘Or at least Zoom us?’

    ‘I wish I could do my bloody job by Zoom,’ said the redhead, Ginger, at the side of her which set off a ripple of laughter.

    ‘You remember us with smiles,’ said Velvet. ‘That’s all we ask. Come here, you.’

    She was passed from one to another, squashed, hugged, kissed, an assault of perfumes, every one as sweet as the next. Then she picked up her pet basket and Denise poked her fingers through the front grid to touch the large brindle rabbit sitting inside it. ‘Goodbye John Abruzzi. Don’t you forget your Auntie Denise, you know, the one that gave you all her best carrots.’ She made a face. ‘He’s got his back to me, I’m talking to his arse. Which is typical working in this place because all I do is talk to people’s arses.’

    She and Mai walked outside slowly, as if delaying the goodbye, then sat on the wall waiting for the taxi which was on its way, according to the phone app.

    ‘I’m glad to get rid of you. I thought you’d never go,’ said Denise.

    ‘You should have said before,’ came the reply.

    ‘You know what I mean. I’ve been waiting since you landed for you to tell me you were moving on.’

    Mai smiled. ‘I’ve been thinking for a long time what I should do with my life and now I have plans.’

    ‘Finally,’ said Denise, raising her hands to heaven in grateful thanks. ‘But promise me that you’ll go and make it up with your mum.’ Her tone was soft, because she wasn’t one to give lectures.

    Mai made no comment on that; there was no point. Denise had a planetsworth of life experience packed inside her, but it was beyond her comprehension to accept that any relationship between a mother and her child could not be salvaged. Plus it was too late for that now, but she hadn’t said as much.

    Denise took the tall, reed-thin woman’s face in her soft, fat hands.

    ‘Think of us occasionally, like Velvet said, my little Mai Tai.’

    She smiled, looking far younger than her seventy years, partly helped by a recent facelift, a top-up of Botox and foundation applied as thickly as cement.

    ‘Of course I will.’

    ‘But don’t look back too much. The past is the past for a reason.’ Denise shoved a small roll of money fastened with an elastic band into her hand, and overrode the protest. ‘It’s for the train.’

    ‘I could buy a blinking train with this wad.’

    ‘Don’t be cheeky.’

    ‘Thank you, Denise. For everything.’

    A car with ‘Steel Taxis’ emblazoned on its side rounded the corner.

    Denise batted away the emotion that was filling the air between them. ‘I’m not sure if I should be thanking you though. Giving that lot ideas. Go on, get your taxi and good luck. I hope you make it happen; if you can’t, no one can.’ Her voice was gruff but there was a telling break in it, not that she’d ever admit to being upset. The line between her work and personal life was bold and definite and yet this beautiful young woman had managed to bridge it. She hated that she’d miss her, but she really had better not come back.

    ‘Mai’ had never belonged here; but she’d belonged here more than she’d ever belonged anywhere, which said it all. Denise hoped this was her finally finding the place that fitted her. She waved once, turned, and went back inside.

    Chapter 2

    Jolene hadn’t smoked for years but the yearning came on her as soon as she’d walked into her mother’s house. She’d last been here only the previous week and yet the house seemed to have aged abruptly since then. She’d noticed the faint smell of old damp before, but now it whacked into her olfactory nerve as soon as she’d closed the front door behind her. It seemed to smell of abandonment as well as age, tempered with a little sadness. It might sound bonkers had she told anyone this of course, but she’d always felt that this house had the architectural equivalent of a soul, and as such she’d wished better for it than to have the Vamplews as its inhabitants.

    It was a good job she didn’t have a packet of twenty in her bag because she would have chain-smoked the lot. And done it in her mother’s parlour just because she could, in a blatant act of defiance. Funny how those closest to you could stir up such polarised emotions. Past and present.

    The house was eerily silent, apart from the slow tock tock of the grandmother clock on the wall marking the time. She hadn’t appreciated how much the atmosphere of a house absorbed the essence of people who lived in it until she’d moved into Warren’s new-build home on the outskirts of Leeds, ten years ago, just before they married. There were no layers of lives lived within its walls, no depth or dimension to the flat, bland air. Warren was the first person to press himself into it, like a weak watermark, to be added to by her and those who came afterwards. It had two hundred years to catch up on all that Fox House had slyly stolen from its residents.

    The Vamplew family home had three floors, six bedrooms, a magnificent dining room and four reception rooms – one of which had been utilised as a study, another as a lady’s parlour. The ceilings were high, the period features intact; previous owners had not sought to rip off the dado and picture rails, chip off the cornices and ceiling roses, tear out the elegant fireplaces. She knew that her mother had decided to buy this house as soon as she saw the staircase, an elegant curl and sweep of wood. She had to own it. But that was her mother all over, coveting things for the sake of it. Once she had them, her job was done, her passion for them sated then withered to nothing, which explained much. Probably why the lovely staircase was the most neglected part of the house now.

    The most cherished was the study where the ever-present cigar smoke had lingered for months after Julian Vamplew’s death, as if the aroma had become every bit a physical characteristic of the room as his burr walnut partner’s desk, the massive antique glass cabinets and his bookshelves crammed with textbooks. It had eventually faded away, although her mother had reported that sometimes, when she went in there, it seemed to her as strong as it ever was. She said she found that manifestation of her husband’s presence comforting. Jolene suspected it was more imagination or hope on her mother’s part but if it brought her comfort, who was she to argue against her fancies?

    Jolene had been crying for hours now and was amazed she had sufficient moisture in her system to produce as many tears as she had. Her only explanation was that maybe she’d been storing it up, like a squirrel storing nuts for hibernation, because she couldn’t remember the last time she’d cried real tears; she tended to cry inside, implode rather than expode. But now, her cheeks were raw from salt burn and sore from tissue wipes and the worst of it was she didn’t know if she was crying for the mother she had, or for the one she wished she’d had but never did.

    Glenda, the cleaner, had been very recently because the kitchen of Fox House was immaculate enough to be photographed for a glossy magazine; even the silver kettle shone like a mirror. Jolene filled it up and switched it on. She took from the cupboard the mug with the poppies on it, the one she always used when she came here. It was part of a set of four that Sally next door had bought as a present. Only this last one remained: her mother thought they were tacky and said she’d been glad when they’d been broken.

    Jolene had slammed that same mug down on the table last Tuesday and stomped out, intending not to come back for a long time. Her mother had a gift for saying words that acted like a needle pushed under the skin, bang-centre into the heart of a nerve.

    ‘Things that don’t bend tend to break, Jolene. Maybe you need to give Warren a little… space.’

    There was only one interpretation of ‘space’ from the way she’d said it. That was so rich coming from someone who would have clawed out her husband’s eyes if he’d asked for some space. She shouldn’t have asked for her mother’s opinion; that just revealed her desperation and really – what else did she expect? She’d been more angry at herself for being so stupid and opening up to her than for the useless advice she received. She’d overreacted in her response, boiled over for the first time ever, asking her what on earth she could possibly know about this sort of problem, then stormed off and had not been in touch since – and now that could never be repaired. Jolene had held her mother’s chilled, dead hand in the hospital and sobbed a rain of apologies, but it didn’t count when they were neither heard nor accepted. She might as well have been railing at the moon, which she’d done enough times by now to know how ineffective that was.

    She was an orphan: the realisation hit her hard, like a slap. There had been a girl at school who was an orphan; her parents had both died in a car crash when she was seven and the word ‘orphan’ was rightly applied to her because she was a child, not a peri-menopausal woman with the first showings of permanent frown lines between her brows. She was in a void at present, even more so than usual because emotions were never good go-to places for her these days. She had the sudden urge to run through the rooms until she found her mum and could bury her face into her dress, feel herself pulled into a warm, Calèche-perfumed embrace. Not this mother who had just passed, but the warm and pliant one that Eleanor Vamplew had once been, before her sisters had come along, when Jolene had her all to herself. She had changed along the road, hardened, like the objects which hung in the petrifying well near Mother Shipton’s cave. Once soft teddy bears, now stone. A double knock-on effect of drip-drip deposition and evaporation, although Jolene had never been able to pinpoint what process her mother had undergone to calcify her.

    Jolene’s text alert went off: Marsha, her younger sister.

    I’ve finally got a flight. I’ll keep you posted. ETA Thursday early morning.

    None of that kiss nonsense at the end.

    They were strangers more than sisters – all three of them, the seven-year gaps between each birth gaping like a grand canyon, although she and Marsha were positively conjoined twins compared to how they both were in relation to Annis, the baby of the family. The spoilt and beautiful one, the renegade. There would be no text from her saying she was on her way. If she hadn’t been there when their father had been desperately ill and died, she certainly wouldn’t turn up for her mother. She hadn’t been at their father’s funeral, not even as a shadowy anonymous figure at the back, hiding under a black veil. Odd, that, because up to the point she had buggered off, aged sixteen, on the coldest night of the year, she’d been the daddy’s girl of all daddies’ girls. He didn’t have favourites, he’d say, but nevertheless he had bestowed the crown on Annis’s head without her even trying that hard for it.

    Jolene sat at the table cradling the poppy mug. She was bone-deep frozen, but then this house never seemed to retain any warmth at all, though they’d got used to that when they were kids. Even if some had built up from the central heating chugging out its best, open a door for a second and it ran out as if chased by a serial killer.

    Her ear flagged a noise, metal grating against metal and her nerves twanged. When she’d lived here as a child she never thought twice about all the noises this old house made, they just were: the cracks during the night as wood expanded or contracted; the bathroom door shifting in its frame as a rogue draught toyed with it. Marsha was convinced she’d seen a ghost once, an old lady sitting on the chair in the corner of her room and smiling at her. The fact that she, the most sensitive of them all, hadn’t run out screaming onto the landing would intimate that it was a lie, although Marsha had argued it was because she wasn’t scared at all, even though the temperature of the room had dipped so much she said she could see plumes of her own breath in the dark.

    The noise again: someone was trying to get in using a key, but Jolene’s own key in the hole was stopping them. Jolene headed quickly down the hallway and snatched open the front door to find their neighbour Sally Lunn there, key in hand ready to attempt entry again. Sally made a squeaky noise of shock and patted her chest as if steadying her heart rhythm.

    ‘Oh, Jolene, I didn’t know anyone was in. I’m sorry, I should have knocked. I didn’t see a car.’

    Jolene hadn’t seen her close up for a few years. She’d aged a lot. Her hair, once a Lego helmet of brown, was now an unbrushed frizz of white and her slight frame was even smaller. She looked not unlike a fresh chick that had fallen out of its nest.

    ‘I parked at the side,’ replied Jolene. Force of habit. Her mother didn’t like to look out of the window and see cars in the front.

    Jolene knew Sally had a key in case of an emergency, but she did wonder why she was trying to get into the house now.

    ‘Is there something you want, Sally?’ she asked.

    ‘No, no… I, er… just wanted to pop in and see that all the plugs were out and… everything was okay.’

    It was what Sally would do, Jolene knew.

    ‘Do you want to come in?’ she asked.

    ‘Yes, yes I will, please but I can’t stay long because of Norman,’ Sally twittered, stepping over the threshold as if it was an honour to be asked. If she’d been wearing a cap, she would have doffed it.

    Jolene’s one abiding memory of Norman Lunn was of him trying to stem the blood from his nose, of it dripping off his chin onto his pale green Bri-Nylon shirt, a froth of grey hair visible on his chest where the top two buttons were undone. Crazy what unimportant details the brain remembered when it could have retained things of much more value. He had dementia now, so her mother had told her. He was a shadow of a shadow of his former self, which was quite an achievement seeing as he had only ever been a shadow of a self in the first place.

    ‘I’m so sorry about your mum, Jolene. I haven’t stopped crying. We were friends for a long time. Since she moved here, in fact. Forty-one years ago. We hit it off from the start.’ Sally smiled fondly; her small eyes were like grey glass, full of tears like clouds full of rain. Even after such a long association, Sally hadn’t worked out that they were never friends. She was useful, convenient. Eleanor Vamplew would have considered Sally Lunn as a sort of confidante lady’s maid at best, one who might have been under the illusion she was more but division of class would have always made that impossible.

    ‘You were just a little tot then,’ Sally went on, now having to bend her head right back to look at Eleanor’s oldest daughter’s face.

    Jolene vaguely remembered living at another house before this one, a much smaller building and less grand. Her mother had inherited her namesake’s fortune which had enabled her to buy Fox House, but she had alienated her family in the process. Not a great loss by all accounts.

    ‘Thank you for all you did for her, Sally. We’re very grateful to you.’

    ‘Did they say what it was that… took her away?’

    ‘No,’ said Jolene. She couldn’t remember what they’d said at the hospital, there had been too much to take in.

    ‘I told the ambulancemen everything. I’m sure her face had dropped a bit on one side, as if she’d had a stroke.’

    ‘Like I said, Sally, I don’t know.’

    There were questions crowded behind a door in Jolene’s head but if she opened it too soon, they’d drown her. They’d wait, the answers couldn’t alter anything now.

    ‘You’ll have a lot to do. So much paperwork. If you wanted any help, you just have to ask. I had to do it all for Norman’s parents so I’m a dab hand at the formalities.’

    ‘Thank you, Sally, but we’ll manage between us.’

    ‘I’m not sure if you know where your mother kept her documents and… things,’ said Sally, smoothing down the front of her checked nylon tabard. It was hard to think of Sally Lunn without one of her tabards. Jolene had a stray thought about the pink one she’d had on the day when her husband’s nose had splattered blood over everything within a half a mile radius; she wondered if she’d ever managed to get the stains out of it.

    ‘She has a file in the parlour in a cupboard, I know,’ said Jolene.

    ‘Her new will isn’t in there though. You’ll need to contact Wragg and Cripwell. The Regent Street branch. They came out to the house to do it for her just after Easter.’

    ‘Oh.’ Jolene hadn’t even thought about wills yet. It didn’t seem decent to. But still, the fact that her mother had revised her will was a small shock. And at Easter, when she’d had that small health niggle but refused to go to the doctor.

    ‘The will has all her requirements for her funeral listed.’ Sally sounded quite anxious now, like someone who had no place to insist on something, insisting all the same. ‘She told me to stress, when the time came, that her instructions should be followed to the letter.’

    ‘They will be, don’t you worry,’ Jolene nodded. She expected nothing less of her mother, who made control freaks seem anarchic.

    ‘I don’t know what… what’s in her will. Just that she told me to make sure I said all this to you,’ Sally twittered on.

    Jolene didn’t really need this now. Her mother had died only hours before and her head was cabbaged. She needed some sleep before even thinking about what came next.

    Sally’s pocket made a buzzing noise. She reached into it and pulled out a phone.

    ‘Sorry, I have to go, Norman’s stirring. I have a camera on my phone that alerts me when it detects movement.’

    ‘How is he?’ asked Jolene, a polite ask.

    ‘Oh, you know, good and bad bits, like the curate’s egg,’ said Sally with a small flash of smile. ‘Not great at the moment if I’m being honest, but I couldn’t put him in a home so’ – she threw her hands up in the air – ‘what can you do but carry on carrying on?’

    ‘I’ll take the key back now,’ said Jolene at the door, smilingly insistent. ‘I don’t suppose you’ll have need of it any more.’

    ‘Oh,’ said Sally. ‘I, er…’ She failed to finish the sentence and sighed as if forced to give up something precious. She wrestled it off her keyring and dropped it into Jolene’s waiting hand from a height that suggested pique.

    ‘Eleanor promised me her locket. I’m sorry to have to mention it now, but I would like it. Something of hers. If not that, just something else that I could wear. I don’t mean to be pushy, but she did say—’

    ‘I’ll look it out for you,’ said Jolene, a wave of weariness washing over her. She would have promised Sally the sitting-room carpet if it meant she left. A little of Mrs Lunn was always enough, especially today.

    ‘Thank you,’ said Sally and hurried off in that strange skittering way of hers.

    Her father used to call Sally Lunn ‘the mouse next door’. He would laugh and say no one with the same name as a bun could be taken seriously and they’d all laugh with him at that. There was a steely determination disguised in all that timidity, though, thought Jolene. In fact, Sally Lunn with her meek, mousy ways had to be built of rock to survive what she had.

    Jolene closed the door, locked and bolted it and made straight for the staircase. She needed to sleep, she was exhausted. She never slept well when her husband Warren was away, and only marginally better when he wasn’t. It was just after seven a.m., 9 August, which would be forever ingrained now in her memory as the day when her mother died, sitting there beside 30 November, the day when her father breathed his last. Coincidentally the exact date when Annis Vamplew had walked out of the house eight years before and never returned.

    Chapter 3

    Marsha took a sharp right and pulled into the large drive in front of Fox House. She’d last been here three weeks ago. A duty visit; they always were, she didn’t get any pleasure from them and she was pretty sure the same was true for her mother, who seemed to endure her presence as she would endure a persistent ache. She couldn’t even remember what they talked about, not much probably – banalities as per usual, long silences punctuated with comments about the garden, bridge club, neighbours, world news. This family wouldn’t have won any prizes for its common ground.

    She parked her red Mercedes next to her sister’s sleek blue Jaguar in the front drive. Hadn’t they done well for themselves, the Vamplew girls, driving such cars, Marsha imagined Sally Lunn next door saying aloud to Norman, because there was nothing surer than that she’d be glued to the window, spying on any comings and goings from behind that net – the neighbourhood witch, one of their father’s nicknames for her; he had quite a few. It had always been her hobby, being a nosy cow. Shame she hadn’t been so observant about what was happening under her nose though until it was so rudely pointed out to her. Marsha’s shoulders gave an involuntary shudder. Of all the memories she had of her childhood, that one was as sharp and bright and multicoloured as it was possible to get. The pink tutu-like swimsuit with the flounce which someone had bought for teeny Annis; the fierce, bright sunshine, the smell of newly mown grass; the buns with the icing and Jelly Tots topping, the paddling pool with the sun-warmed water.

    She got out of the car and the heat of the day hit her after the coolness of the air conditioning. She zapped the lock and walked towards the house. It was by far the grandest structure in the area. Move it from its midway position between Penistone and Barnsley and transplant it in the Home Counties and it would be worth at least a few million pounds more.

    There were fourteen houses on the avenue, each one different from the next, a hotch potch of architecture but it was the solid, stone Fox House that was its oldest inhabitant – and king, looking as if it had been there forever and would stay there for even longer. Behind the high brick walls and black iron gates which were almost always open, was a large gravel parking space, enough for ten cars easily, flanked by lawn and rose beds. The house itself had a wide frontage with a huge central stone porch and two massive west-facing bay windows at either side of it which served to let light pour into their father’s office and the dining room in the afternoons. There were five large sash windows on the first floor, three of them serving the master suite alone.

    Once upon a time there had only been four houses on the street, all with a mass of land that had been carved up and sold off over the last hundred years. The other three were long gone; the Lunns’ detached house next door was now the second oldest, designed in the 1930s by an architect with an apparent aversion to windows. The result was that the rooms, even the south-facing ones, were dark. The gardens belonging to the houses on this side of the avenue were enormous, stretching right down to Maltstone Beck and the railway line; they were much smaller and more manageable on the other side.

    Fox House looked different in every season. Prettiest in spring, Marsha thought, with the crowded borders of snowdrops, daffodils, hyacinths and crocuses, artfully planted not to look too arranged. They’d employed gardeners to do the lawn and the bulk of the weeding, but it had been her mother, until the arthritis in her hands had prevented her from doing so, who dead-headed the roses, grew the seedlings, nurtured the exotics in the greenhouse. She’d given her moonflowers and sapphire orchids the sort of intense attention she’d never given to people.

    Now in high summer, the house looked stunning, like a jewel set in a verdant mount, the lawns so lush and green they’d acquired an almost artificial colour. There wasn’t a dandelion allowed to push out of the ground without an immediate death sentence being imposed on it. The gardener was good, she had to say.

    She saw a figure in the window and waved; it waved back. She hadn’t seen her sister since Christmas and that was more or less in passing. She envied people who said they were going out shopping with their sister or taking a family trip with their sister and mother – all girls together. It was part of the reason why her maternal button had never been pressed, in case she had a family that ended up like the Vamplews: dried crumbs that would not bind, however much they were pressed together.

    She twisted the octagonal iron doorknob that she could barely grip in her small hand and pushed open the heavy front door that was so much bigger than normal doors. Everything about Fox House was bigger, though – the widths and lengths and heights, as if it had been built on a larger scale for a giant. It was the sort of house that occupants moved on from but looked back on with fondness. Well, maybe previous occupants because Marsha had very few happy memories of the years she’d lived here. She’d been eleven when Jolene left

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