‘A new friend?’ she said, her interest piqued. ‘You were only out just over an hour!’ She peered over the top of her reading glasses to look back over at Matthew, coming in from the kitchen area, wiping icing sugar off his hands with a tea towel. I saw his eyes clock the fact I still had my shoes on – he was always keen to preserve the cream carpet – but he didn’t nag me for it in front of my mum.
‘Yes, a lovely young woman named Rachel. Practically collided with her in M&S, although Charlie had met her before. She’s going to join my book club.’
I felt my brow crease a little at his words. The way he’d worded it sounded like Rachel and I were established friends. ‘We’d only bumped into each other in Waterstones a few minutes earlier. I don’t know her.’ The last bit sounded slightly defensive and I think my mother noticed.
‘Maybe you should join the book club, too,’ she said to me. ‘Give you something to do.’
This was the kind of comment from my mother that regularly irritated me. Just because I worked from home a couple of days a week, she often made out I was practically unemployed.
‘I think I’ve already got enough to do,’ I said, shortly. Matthew came over to me and sat down on the sofa, also holding a plate of food, although his one was loaded with the large slice of cake Titus had used in the photo. His warm frame, the smell of his Ralph Lauren aftershave mingling with the scent of freshly baked cake, instantly made me feel less tense. He let an arm fall around me and said, ‘Why don’t you come to our next meeting? It would be nice for Rachel to see another face she knows.’
‘Maybe,’ I said, offering a vague nod, and extricated myself from Matthew’s embrace, muttering about putting some washing on. Once we’d got off the subject of the book club, we continued our Sunday in our usual peaceful way – a walk in the park, dinner out in the evening – blissfully unaware that we had walked straight into a trap.
Chapter Two Rachel
Twelve months to go
It was better for everyone that I was leaving Yorkshire. The shit general-dogsbody job I had at a depressing garden centre wasn’t exactly a dream come true, and I still hadn’t decided what to do with my mum’s inheritance. The idea of it sitting in a bank account, unused, while I rented a spare room above my manager’s garage, made me feel ill. Squandered potential. A waste. Some would love to have a heap of cash sitting there, ready and waiting whenever they wanted it. Not me. Each pound and penny of it would be painted with the shitshow of the past. And using it would mean facing up to those demons. So I hadn’t properly decided what to do with it, until the day I opened up Instagram to have a quick flick through during a quiet moment in between stacking up tubs of fertiliser. And on that day, my life changed for ever.
It was a hashtag. That’s how I saw it. #WeekendBaking. I’d clicked on it after seeing a photo of a delicious-looking banana and toffee cake come up on my feed, and fancied having a scroll through similar items. And there, suddenly, he was. The man from my dreams. My nightmares. My waking thoughts. He was older, of course. And age suited him. He was one of those lucky people that seem to wear their slight wrinkles in a comfortable way – a way that says to the world ‘aren’t I loveable and look at me enjoying life’ rather than ‘I’m approaching forty with the speed of a runaway train’. In the photo, he was standing with another man and a teenage boy, who must have been about fourteen or fifteen. He had his arm on his shoulder, and in front of them were about four different cakes, with different toppings. #SaturdayBaking. They looked so … perfect. The kitchen was clearly beautiful, with a shiny marble top, a sleek-looking American fridge-freezer behind them and one of those expensive standing-mixers to the side of the countertop. And the three of them dressed in those sorts of soft, pricy fabrics that beg to be touched. All these details made me fall to my knees, and then properly to the ground, so that I was sitting, like a strange child, awkwardly cross-legged next to the tubs of fertiliser, while the rain pattered loudly on the roof of the garden centre overhead.
‘Are you quite all right?’
I looked up, bleary-eyed, to see a middle-aged woman staring down at me. She was clasping a small terracotta pot in one hand and a closed umbrella in the other, and appeared to be baffled to find me sitting there on the floor in the corner, phone out, my uniform making it clear I was a member of staff and should therefore be busy. I stared back up at her, quickly sussing out the type of customer she was – the sort of middle-aged middle-class visitor we often got at this time of the week. The type whose husband earned enough for them to float around garden centres in the middle of a working day, buying the odd geranium or accessory they didn’t really need before meeting a friend for lunch in the connecting café.
‘Hello? Can you hear me?’
The woman was still bending over me, and the look on her face – probably a reaction to the distant look I had on mine – suggested that she feared I was insane in some way. I saw one hand float subconsciously to her handbag, as if I might make a sudden grab for it and leg it out the door.
‘I can hear you,’ I said, not as politely as a member of staff
