For a moment she thought he hadn’t heard. He picked up his teaspoon and thoughtfully he began to stir his coffee. It was several seconds before he responded. ‘Are you going to tell me the whole story?’

‘It’s complicated.’

‘All life is complicated, Abi. That is its challenge.’ He glanced up at last and smiled as he met her gaze. His eyes, she noticed, were inestimably weary. They were hazel, flecked with green and very kind and they missed nothing. ‘I am sure that you have thought this through with great care, and wouldn’t have come to see me without a good deal of heartache, Abi, but I think you are going to have to start at the beginning.’

She sighed. Of course she was. She hadn’t expected anything else.

She was an attractive woman; she could hardly deny it, though her looks did not actually interest her much. She was thirty-two years old, tall and willowy, with long, naturally wavy dark hair and clear grey eyes. Confident and with, so she had been told, a great deal of charm, she had arrived in the parish of St Hugh’s Juxta Mure to take up the position of curate in a large bustling suburb of north Cambridge, full of quiet anticipation. But, in this day and age, when Anglican priests were in such short supply, she had been not a little disappointed when she found that she was to be given a second curacy instead of her own parish. She had served two years of what amounted to apprenticeship in a rural parish near Huntingdon when she was abruptly called in and told that she was being moved elsewhere. Why? Of course, it was obvious it would be easier to move her as an unmarried woman without the complications of a family already settled into an area, but even so, she was a bit upset. She was after all a mature woman with some experience of the world under her belt – she had spent time both as a history lecturer and a journalist before her ordination – but she curbed her impatience, after she was told that her new posting was in a large, complex community that required the services of at least two full-time priests, that the previous curate had been taken ill and the need for a replacement was urgent.