‘Why on earth didn’t you tell me about this at the time?’ Caroline prompted in disbelief.

‘It was only a few months since you had buried your husband,’ her father reminded her. ‘You had enough to cope with.’

‘We’ve only been given two weeks to move out of our home!’ Isabel Hales exclaimed. A small blonde woman in her late sixties, with a tight lack of facial lines and movement that suggested a good deal of surgical enhancement, she was the exact opposite in appearance of her tall, heavily built husband. ‘I can’t believe it. I knew the business was gone-but our home as well? It’s a nightmare!’

Engaged in giving her father’s heavy shoulder a comforting squeeze, Caroline resisted the urge to try and comfort her tear-stained mother with a hug. She was a touchy-feely person, and always had been, but her mother was not. While her father had grown up secure as the son of the major employer in the district, her mother had been raised by socially ambitious parents who’d been resentful of their lowly status and lack of money. Isabel was their daughter in every way, with the same aspirations and the same reverence for wealth.

Ill-matched though Joe and Isabel might initially have seemed, the only disappointment in their marriage had proved to be Isabel’s infertility. The Haleses had been in their forties by the time they’d adopted Caroline at the age of three. As their only child she had enjoyed an excellent education and a stable home life, and would never have dreamt of voicing the reality that she was much closer to her kind-hearted father than her often sharply critical and pushy mother. In truth she had never shared her adoptive mother’s aspirations or interests, and was uncomfortably aware that the opinions she held and the choices she made had dismayed and disappointed both her parents.

‘How can we only have two weeks to move out of our home?’ Caroline exclaimed, in a voice weakened by incredulity.