The Single Mums' Secrets: a laugh out loud rom com from the bestselling author of The Single Mums' Mansion

By Janet Hoggarth

Everyone's got secrets... but not everyone can keep them!
Recently widowed Louise is facing life as a single mum of three. As her sister Christa keeps telling her, the tragic accident that claimed the life of her husband was just that: an accident. So why does she feel so guilty...?

At long last, Carl's winning the battle against his demons; he's in therapy, he has a new girlfriend, and he loves life in The Mews where he's surrounded by friends who feel like family. But then he gets some news that will change his life forever...

Christa can't have kids and she's okay with that – even though her (ex)boyfriend suddenly isn't. A one-night stand with her gorgeous neighbour Carl is the perfect way to move on... until it results in a shocking surprise.

If she's going to face her new future head-on, Christa must finally deal with a long-buried secret from her past... but she's going to need all the help she can get. Can the residents of The Mews pull together to make sure everyone gets their happy ending?

Will these single mums be able to move on from life in the mansion?

Perfect for fans of Marian Keyes, Sophie Kinsella, Lindsey Kelk and Mhairi McFarlane.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Aug 6, 2020
• ISBN: 9781788545709

Janet Hoggarth

Janet Hoggarth is the number one bestselling author of The Single Mums' Mansion and the highly successful Single Mums' subsequent series. She has worked on a chicken farm, as a bookseller, a children’s book editor, a children’s author, and as a DJ (under the name of Whitney and Britney!). She lives with her family in East Dulwich, London.

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Also by Janet Hoggarth

The Single Mums’ Mansion

The Single Mums Move On

THE SINGLE MUMS’ SECRET

Janet Hoggarth

AN IMPRINT OF HEAD OF ZEUS

www.ariafiction.com

This edition first published in the United Kingdom in 2020 by Aria, an imprint of Head of Zeus Ltd

Copyright © Janet Hoggarth, 2020

The moral right of Janet Hoggarth to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781788545709

Aria

c/o Head of Zeus

First Floor East

5–8 Hardwick Street

London EC1R 4RG

www.ariafiction.com

Contents

Welcome Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter 1: The Beginning

Chapter 2: The Guilt Train

Chapter 3: That Was Then This Is Now

Chapter 4: Carl

Chapter 5: After the Casseroles Stop

Chapter 6: Louise

Chapter 7: Mortifying Hormonal Rage

Chapter 8: Carl

Chapter 9: Louise

Chapter 10: Carl

Chapter 11: Menopause Madness

Chapter 12: Impossibly Possible

Chapter 13: Carl

Chapter 14: Louise

Chapter 15: The Blame Game

Chapter 16: Reading Festival 1994

Chapter 17: The Aftermath

Chapter 18: The Vow

Chapter 19: The Scan

Chapter 20: Carl

Chapter 21: Louise

Chapter 22: Baby Mother

Chapter 23: Moving Out

Chapter 24: Louise and Winnie

Chapter 25: Lara

Chapter 26: Party Party

Chapter 27: Louise

Chapter 28: Center Parcs

Chapter 29: Winnie

Chapter 30: Forced Fun

Chapter 31: SOS

Chapter 32: Carl

Chapter 33: Louise

Chapter 34: Carl

Chapter 35: Lara

Chapter 36: Last Day

Chapter 37: Louise

Chapter 38: Carl

Chapter 39: About Bloody Time

Chapter 40: Carl

Chapter 41: Louise

Chapter 42: An Engagement

Chapter 43: Louise

Chapter 44: Back in the Hood

Chapter 45: One More Vow

Chapter 46: Carl

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

About the Author

For Rachel Johnson who was my doula and friend at every one of my children’s births. And for all NHS staff, especially midwives. Thank you.

Prologue

What does the word ‘vow’ mean to you? For such a diminutive word, it has so many implications. So close to triumphant ‘wow’ and yet so far. For me it is a word of shackled extremes: I vow to love you until the end of time; I vow to find you and then I will kill you; I vow to lose my virginity by the time I’m eighteen; I vow to thee my country; I vow that I will never change my mind; I vow to do my best – no one ever vows that they will give it a whirl and see what happens.

And then there are the sacred marriage vows, those words, supposedly set in stone, which no one can break without experiencing extreme vicissitudes of fortune. I vow to forsake you for all others… So why make them at all when currently one in three marriages end in divorce? A vow of chastity – pledging to not spill one’s seed or flick one’s bean in order to serve a sky fairy without the sinful hindrance of the Devil’s horn. There are all manner of religious zealot vows, running off into extremism from the beginning of time until present day.

What fuels the need for vows, a word that is essentially a promise? Fear. Promises can be easily broken. But a vow – it has much more clout. It has the illusion of sturdy foundations, of years of history supporting it, making the word appear indestructible in the face of weakness. If a word has all those connotations attached to it, then when one makes a vow, one is buying in to that ideology.

So, naturally I made a couple of vows to myself, wearing them as an impenetrable coat of armour for many years, protecting me from the past. They had worked so far. I hadn’t broken them, and by not doing so, I had strangely brought upon myself a change of unwelcome circumstances, which in the end, just added grist to the mill of life. Onwards, I said. But something unwittingly squeezed in. A tiny seed of doubt, lighting the fuse of a memory I’d stamped all over with my vows. And now I couldn’t ignore it, no matter how hard I tried, and I did try. I really did…

1

The Beginning

The church was almost full; I didn’t recognise a lot of the people here. The children had remained at home with Lindsey, the babysitter; they were too young to attend. Louise held my hand, clinging on for dear life, her fingers corpse cold even though it was showing signs of summer outside in the last week of May. I’m not a fan of church funerals. They can tip either way – be an almost jolly affair with a selection of uplifting hymns and a charming eulogy that pinpoints the deceased in succinct bullet points, a bit like an optimistic Tinder profile. Or they can be properly depressing with hymns no one knows, ensuring a pathetic mumbled choral response, and a colour-by-numbers tribute where only the names have been changed. (Nigel, Steve, Peter, Oscar, John was a keen reader of hard-core pornography and also enjoyed ornithology.) Nigel’s funeral was the latter. My eyes meandered past the boiled-sweet stained glass windows up towards the rafters, questioning how they cleaned them. They surely harboured fleshy cobwebs, potential draughts in danger of setting them free to float down from their moorings, coating a member of the congregation in a gossamer funeral shroud.

As a matter of course when attending a church funeral (any funeral to be honest), sex seedily crept into my head. I’d lost my virginity after a friend’s bleak funeral when I was eighteen and two months. There’s nothing like facing your own mortality to get the juices flowing. I can’t even listen to Purple Rain now without thinking of it as Purple Pain. Anyone who says that it doesn’t hurt or that the blood bath is a myth must have acquiesced to a man with an asparagus-sized penis. Trust me to have decided on eventually letting down my drawbridge for someone endowed with a Coke can between his thighs. My eyes watered thinking about it at the front of the church listening to the vicar expand on Nigel’s good points, while ignoring that he could be a bit of a selfish knob.

The aftermath of the much-anticipated deflowering I had fantasised about for years had been like clearing up after a gangland massacre. Without the professional help of Winston Wolf, I was pretty much stumped because I had no idea how to use the washing machine, selfish teenager that I was. I’d had to enlist the help of Sally, my sensible friend who lived on the periphery of Haslemere, a five-minute drive from my parents’ house.

‘Are you free?’ I’d rung Sally in a panic. Mum was at work and would be back at six. Louise would be back from school at four-thirty. It was three in the afternoon. Robert had skedaddled, unable to hide his revulsion at how much I had bled all over my bobbly lemon nylon sheets. At least he’d decoded the washing machine’s Masonic symbols for me, though I had no idea how to put it on a spin cycle.

‘Yes, how was the funeral?’

‘Hideous. Can I come and pick you up? Bring your hairdryer.’

‘OK.’ That was why I’d asked her, no tricky questions.

Once back in the kitchen, lugging out the sopping wet sheet from the washing machine, Sally turned to me.

‘You finally did it, then.’

‘How did you know?’

‘I just did, the minute you mentioned the hairdryer.’ We stood in the kitchen, both of us blasting the sheet with two dryers buzzing like wasps, barely making a dent. In the end I slept in a damp bed that night, but at least I was no longer a virgin…

A pompous hymn jolted me away from the Home Counties pine cabinets and mid-eighties periodic terracotta tile splashbacks. It was written in the stars that Louise wouldn’t cope. She wasn’t born to be a widow, or a single mum. She’d always been cosseted by the constant reassuring presence of a boyfriend from the age of twelve and hadn’t had to face the insecurities and nightmarish underworld of puberty alone.

I’d prescribed her some diazepam to knock her out after the initial shock. She needed to sleep. The kids depended on her, but she also deserved a break from her own head. Initially she kept repeating she was being punished, that it was all her fault. Even when she was drugged and lying face down on her super king-sized bed, incoherent mumblings drifted up from her slack mouth: ‘My fault, all my fault.’ Unless she had cut the brakes on his car, she had done nothing wrong.

Mum and Dad had moved in to help initially, but they couldn’t stay for ever. They were getting on and the stairs were too steep and plentiful for Dad’s arthritic hip.

‘Christa, can you stay for a bit?’ Mum had asked the day before the funeral. I’d already guessed they’d ask me that at some point. Louise lived in Forest Hill, not too far from me in East Dulwich, and my surgery was in Nunhead, about a mile and a half away.

‘I can tell you’re not keen to move in,’ she deduced from my silence as we unpacked family-sized bags of crisps, pre-packed cakes and light bites from Sainsbury’s bags for the wake. ‘I know you’ve had a lot of upheaval yourself. And you and Louise had that weird time in the nineties when you didn’t speak. Don’t worry, I’m not probing.’ A dim recollection flickered briefly of Mum trying not to cry down the phone. I’d just told her I was spending Christmas with Mia in Manchester. I didn’t come home for a while… ‘And three kids are a lot to get used to when all you ever have to think about is yourself.’

Was that a dig? Mum didn’t understand why I wasn’t married with children like perfect Louise. She’d come to a reluctant kind of acceptance, my age and current non-relationship status snuffing out future lines of enquiry. I loved Louise’s children but by God, I was glad they weren’t mine. Louise couldn’t go for a poo without one of them following her. She cooked all meals from scratch and refused any kind of domestic help. I admired her in that way you might a martyr for doggedly refusing to give up their beliefs knowing they will kill them in the end.

‘I don’t understand why I need to move in. I can go and help out when I’m not working.’

‘She’s never been on her own in her life.’

That’s not my fault, I wanted to object, but that was churlish and mean. Nigel had only just died in a car crash and she’d been expected to identify his mangled body. I had accompanied her and had actually done the identifying because, to be honest, I’d seen my fair share of dead bodies. I’d taught dissection to students as part of my training, the cadavers preserved with a rubbery-scented chemical that still couldn’t mask the smell of death.

However, inspecting Nigel on the cold mortuary slab, an unexpected surge of nausea swelled inside me threatening to expel my coffee from earlier. I was glad Louise hadn’t witnessed that his head had been partially severed from his neck, like an axe murderer had been caught in the act leaving the job half finished. You can’t un-see stuff like that…

*

I silently mimed the stuffy words of the hymn, not wishing to inflict my singing voice onto the congregation. I surreptitiously eyed Louise as she stared dry-eyed at the order of service, her hands clenching the paper, its edges curling into the centre like one of those tacky fortune-telling fish. I couldn’t imagine how she was even here, standing up, breathing in and out; the pain must have been crippling. I thought she was coping surprisingly well. A sudden pang of guilt speared me in the belly. I could move in with her, but I did really love where I was in the Mews. I’d ended up there after Tom and I had split up and a chance conversation at the surgery had managed to solve my housing woes…

‘Are you still looking for somewhere to live?’ Margaret the practice manager had asked me a few weeks after everyone had found out that Tom and I were no more. In effect it was I who had caused the break-up so it only felt right that I should move out of our three-bedroomed terrace in Peckham. Neither of us wanted to buy the other out, so it was decided we would sell. I’d been temporarily living in Louise’s spare room, something I wasn’t exactly relishing. Louise and I hadn’t lived together since we’d been home in the uni holidays, sharing the same family bathroom and using the place as a dosshouse in between holiday jobs and sporadic social lives.

‘Yes. Do you know of somewhere?’ I’d answered Margaret.

‘I do actually. A woman I go dog walking with is looking to temporarily move out of her four-bedroomed house in a local gated development. She needs someone trustworthy to take it on as it’s a shared house with student lodgers. Might be a good stopgap instead of paying full whack for your own place. Jo’s quite a character too…’

‘I’m not sure I want to babysit students… Give me her number and I’ll have a think about it.’

After another week had slipped by unnoticed and I still hadn’t perused all the details from letting agents clogging up my inbox, I decided to ring this Jo woman.

‘Darling, come round this evening. You can meet the others too. It’s one big happy family in the Mews.’ She sounded loud and over the top and I imagined someone who resembled the love child of Scary Spice and Graham Norton. She was neither.

‘Come in, come in, would you like a glass of wine?’ Jo was a stocky woman who reached just above my shoulder. Her long black hair reminded me of the unsettling girl from The Ring but she was charm personified; I liked her immediately. She looked about the same age as me, early forties. I declined the wine and she introduced me to the other three housemates, who all appeared to be wet behind the ears but harmless-looking.

There were a million pets barking and mewling. ‘Don’t worry, the animals will be coming with me, unless you’re really called Doctor Dolittle?’

I followed her up two flights of stairs to a room at the very top of the house next to Jo’s office, which wasn’t rented out as a bedroom, and surveyed my prospective new bolthole. A large double bedroom with black lacquered furniture, a giant TV mounted on the wall, and a walk-in wet room. I walked over to the window and looked down on the street below. Other houses and some half houses faced me. It felt like a zoo after all the visitors had gone home. There was a little girl whizzing up and down the pavement on her pink scooter until she was called in by a tall blonde woman I assumed was her mum.

‘They’re Grace and Ali – they’re lovely.’

‘How long are you moving out for?’ I asked Jo turning round, reviewing the room once more.

‘Six months. I have another property that needs doing up and it’ll be easier if I just live in and do it.’ I took account of the easy commute to my Nunhead surgery. I weighed up the money I would save against having my own place. It was only six months. I was certain our ‘lovingly restored’ Victorian terrace would be snapped up before then by a couple or a young family. Living here would alleviate the stress of trying to find somewhere else then being tied into a year-long agreement. There was also a weekly cleaner.

‘OK, I’ll take it.’

‘Fabulous stuff. I have a feeling you’ll fit right in. Any problems with any of those lot downstairs and you get on the blower to me, OK? I’ll sort their shit out.’

That had been eight months ago and I had been here just shy of that. The thought of moving to be with Louise and then moving again once the house sold was annoying. When my loose tenancy agreement had come to a close and Tom and I still had no buyer for our house, Jo offered another six months; the flat was taking longer to renovate than she’d anticipated. She was back and forth anyway because all her friends were in the Mews and there were parties and a drinks evenings and BBQs in the summer. It reminded me of halls of residence when I was at medical school in Sheffield back in the nineties.

*

Tom attended the funeral looking heartbreakingly handsome in his navy suit, an unfitting stab in my chest reminding me I wasn’t going home with him afterwards. I mused how I didn’t really feel like that at work (though at first it had been unbearable). These days I could go home to the Mews and not think about him returning to our house we had painted together, picked furniture for, where we’d had sex drunk on the kitchen floor (I’d found a red lentil and a papery garlic skin stuck to my bum afterwards). Why did that not bother me as much as him not taking me home after Nigel’s funeral?

How dare I feel that heartbreak when Louise was imprisoned in the worst day of her life? It felt decidedly selfish, so I crushed it down by smiling at him when I passed his pew as Louise and I walked out of the church and into the withering heat of the afternoon sun.

‘How is she coping?’ Tom politely enquired back at Louise’s house during the wake. He was holding a flimsy paper plate containing two mini sausage rolls, a sizable portion of the crisp mountain, and a cucumber sandwich. I wasn’t hungry. It also felt wrong to be eating in front of Louise when she couldn’t even drink a cup of tea. She had lost about a stone since the accident. She didn’t need to lose a stone, but according to her, Isaac’s baby weight hadn’t shifted in two years. There was no sign of it now. She’d worn a body-skimming Karen Millen navy and red dress she’d not fitted in for years for the funeral.

‘She’s managing. To be honest, I know the next year is going to be harder than today. Right now she has everyone making sure she’s OK. It’s when all that inevitably stops that the shit show comes to town.’ I’d seen so many grief casualties in the surgery, enough to work out people drop you as soon as the funeral is over. It seems you find out who your real friends are in the year afterwards.

‘I suppose you’ve printed out all the leaflets on grief, support groups…?’

‘Yeah, she’s got the lot. And I’ve got some books coming from Amazon. Some for the kids too.’

The house was emptying out as people said their stilted goodbyes. Phil, Nigel’s quietly spoken younger brother, was clearing away smeared glasses without being asked. He was a photographic negative of Nigel on so many levels. I often wondered how two siblings could be such opposites. Mum bustled over almost in a Mother of the Bride cloud of importance, but that badge had already been claimed by Jean, Nigel’s mum, who had wailed throughout the entire funeral in a dramatic Mother of the Deceased fanfare.

I genuinely felt bad for her when it appeared she was going to throw herself on the coffin at the crematorium for the family-only goodbye. I noticed Brendon, Nigel’s dad, put his arm across her to prevent her launching herself when the mustard-coloured curtains opened and the coffin slid towards its infernal ending. Poor Jean.

‘Have either of you seen Louise?’ Mum asked.

‘I’ve worked the room, spoken to everyone and not seen her at all for the last half hour.’

‘Is she upstairs hiding?’ Tom asked.

‘No, she’s not anywhere. The children are asking where she is. People are leaving and she might want to say goodbye.’

‘I doubt it, Mum. Let her be. She probably doesn’t want to talk. The place is packed with so many people from Nigel’s work it’s most likely too overwhelming.’

Tom said his farewell after he’d demolished another plate of food and kissed me on the cheek. He kissed Mum too and shook Dad’s hand.

‘See you at work.’ I wanted to leave with him, to go to the pub, down a bottle of wine and then lie next to him in bed all night in our house and pretend that the last year hadn’t happened. But it was too late now.

‘Such a shame…’ Mum lamented as Tom shut the front door.

‘Nice to see Tom,’ Dad said, putting his arm around my shoulder.

‘I’m going to find Louise.’ I stormed past Jean who had resumed crying whilst studying the wedding photos in the hallway. I had a sneaking suspicion where she might be.

‘How did you know?’ Louise said when I sniffed her out on the corner of Perry Vale behind the station. She was smoking a fag and had sneaked out a bottle of Peroni to go with it. She’d not smoked since she fell pregnant with Ted over ten years ago.

‘It was where Nigel knocked you off your bike in his car. I thought you might have wanted to pay your respects to where it all started.’ I grinned and she smiled back at me like a mad person balancing on the edge of sanity. ‘Don’t go throwing yourself in the road to re-enact breaking your arm though.’ She swayed on the edge of the kerb like a tightrope walker.

‘I did it!’ The words burst out of her like cannon balls. ‘I made it happen. The accident. It’s my fault.’ She swigged the beer, the fag idly dwindling in her limp right hand. People were walking past us coming home from work. A few men glanced appreciatively at her. Louise looked polished for the first time in years. She normally didn’t wear dresses, said they’re not practical with little ones, but she looked stunning, if a little haggard and crazed. Grief was a cruel mistress.

‘We’ve been over this. It was an accident that no one caused. The lorry had a blowout on the dual carriageway. He wouldn’t have been able to get out of the way in time.’

‘I’m being punished.’ She shook her head, dismissing my words.

‘What for?’

She took a drag of her cigarette and blew the smoke up into the air. I couldn’t see her face when she answered me.

‘Having an affair.’

2

The Guilt Train

‘Jesus, Lou. No way! You had an affair?’ Not Saint Louise who did everything by the book and even made her own organic cleaning products from lemon juice, vinegar and water. She had gifted me a batch for my birthday one year in beautiful glass spray bottles. I loathed admitting it, but it made the limescale-encrusted sink shine like a mirror.

She swung her head round and looked right at me. ‘Why are you saying it like that?’

‘I’m not saying it like anything. I just can’t imagine you sneaking around behind Nigel’s back.’ For a start he was either always at work or on the golf course. Who would have looked after the children? She doted on them and I couldn’t imagine her wanting to play with fire where they were concerned.

‘It wasn’t like that,’ she snapped. She swilled from the bottle of beer. I knew when to keep my mouth shut and just stared into the distance for a few moments instead.

‘Then how was it an affair? Surely an affair needs to involve some kind of sexual connection.’

‘No, it can be anything. We were… are friends. It’s more of a spiritual relationship.’

I tried not to laugh and wondered if he was even a living and breathing person. Was she shagging a ghost?

‘Don’t start,’ she said and inhaled the butt tip of the fag then flicked it on the ground and crushed it underfoot.

‘I’m not starting anything. Look, you’re under a shitload of stress. You’re bound to lean on people to help you get through it. Do whatever it takes. Is he still on the scene now?’

‘Well, I still see him – I can’t really avoid it – but we’re not really talking if that’s what you mean.’

‘Would it help seeing him?’

‘I don’t know. He’s married.’

‘Who is he, Lou?’

She chewed two nails thoughtfully, considering her answer. ‘A dad at school. We just get on.’

‘I’m still struggling to see how this is an affair that’s contributed to you thinking you’re being punished. You’re allowed to be friends with people of the opposite sex if you’re married.’

‘It was more than friends. But now it’s all blown up because of this.’ She spread her hands out to her sides, the Peroni clutched in the left one, and shook her head. ‘I feel so so shit. More than shit. I don’t know a word for how I feel. There isn’t one. My whole body hurts. My throat feels like it’s gone into anaphylactic shock. I can just about manage a drink if I smoke beforehand.’

She started crying, big gulping sobs that rinsed off the remains of her make-up. I hugged her hard, she smelled of smoke and her usual perfume.

‘There’s so much you don’t know,’ she gasped in between weeping. Annoyingly I didn’t have a tissue on me. People skirted round us and into the road to get past rather than risk rubbing their shoulders on our black cloud.

‘You don’t have to tell me; now isn’t the time. I have some diazepam in my bag back at yours. Do you want to take some?’

She shook her head.

‘It might help you to sleep. I can do bedtime. Lindsey stayed a bit longer to help out. The kids have all been eating the beige food from the buffet. I hope that’s OK. I brought my bag for work with me and a set of clothes in case you need me to stay.’

‘Thank you. Mum and Dad are staying. They’ve been great. They have no idea about anything so please don’t say a word.’ An ambulance whooshed past behind us on the South Circular, sirens blasting, life and death carrying on like it did.

‘I think we should head back; people will have left by now. I hope so anyway. Poor Jean was acting like an Italian nonna at a Catholic funeral; all we needed was her to start ripping her clothes. You missed her wailing at your wedding photos. It must be incredibly hard to lose a child, no matter how old they are.’ Even so, it was a very un-British way of behaving. Everyone else toed the line and stuck to the British Guidelines for Funeral Etiquette. Rule number one: Do not show any emotion, especially as the coffin is paraded down the aisle. If you must cry, do it silently. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was part of those new citizen tests.

‘That’s what Jewish mothers do – they rip their clothes… Fuck, what do I do with all the photos everywhere? And his clothes? Oh God, his office, the shed?’ She started crying as we walked slowly back to the house. She rubbed her nose furiously to try and stem the stream of snot.

‘Don’t think about any of that now. Phil said he would sort Nigel’s laptop and email accounts, keep an eye on incoming messages for the next few months. Everything else can wait. Just think about trying to eat something and lying down. And the kids. They need to see you.’

I left later on once the children were in bed. Ted and Gemma had obviously been upset. But Isaac just wanted his milk and to climb in his cot with Peppa Pig. His speech was still infantile, ironically ‘Dad’ being the one word that was recognisable amid the babbling.

I parked my car on the drive when I got home. As I climbed out, Ali’s front door opened. She was dumping the recycling in the blue bin.

‘Hi!’ she called over. ‘Good day with all the hypochondriacs?’

‘It was Nigel’s funeral today.’

‘Oh, fuck, so sorry. How was it?’ She closed the recycling bin lid and walked over to my side of the street. I always admired the way she effortlessly managed to look stylish, even in shorts and flip-flops, sunglasses perched on her head, scraping her fringe back off her face. I would love to go to work in shorts and flip-flops. As senior partner, I could implement it as a choice, but knew it would go down like a parade of anti-vaxxers.

‘Pretty hideous.’ I explained about Nigel’s mum’s emotional display and Louise disappearing off. ‘I found her at the junction where Nigel knocked her off her bike eleven years ago.’

‘Is that how they met?’

I nodded.

‘Do you want to come in for a glass of wine? Grace is in bed.’ I glanced towards my house. I knew I had a Cook Lasagne For One stashed in the freezer lurking behind half a wholemeal loaf of bread I’d rammed in there six months ago to stop it going off. I hated cooking. Well, hate is too strong a word for warming up limp leftovers in a microwave or shoving a ready meal in the oven. Since Tom and I had split up, I’d found cooking for one a miserable exercise.

‘Yeah, why not? My dinner can stay in the freezer for a bit longer.’

‘I can make you something if you want. I haven’t eaten yet. I don’t like eating on my own.’

‘Where’s Nick?’ Nick was Ali’s boyfriend, who also happened to reside in the Mews, a few doors further up on my side.

‘He’s at a work do; I’m not seeing him until Friday, which suits me just fine. I feel like a headless chicken at the moment; work is so busy. Not that I’m complaining!’

Theirs was one of those obvious yin/yang relationships. Nick revelled in his own yin-ness (quiet in large groups, very chilled, a good listener), while Ali’s overenthusiastic yang brought the party to any occasion. The Mews with all its interwoven and occasionally complicated neighbourhood relationships often felt like co-existing in a BBC televised social experiment, City Life in the 2000s. I could hear the theme tune in my head. I fancied it sounded a bit like the reassuring plucky strings of The Great British Bake Off.

I had grown up on an anodyne eighties cul-de-sac in Haslemere, a small