There she hammered shaped and soldered silver and precious stones into the jewellery she designed and sold on an internet website. It was painstaking, delicate work, which required a keen eye and full concentration. While she worked, her elegant seal point Siamese cat, Koko, sat like a sentinel on the bench by her side. When Caroline felt a familiar tightening round her brow she knew that one of the nasty migraines she occasionally suffered from was threatening. Soon afterwards she finished off for the night, tidied up and went up to bed.

Of course by then, even though she’d taken her medication to dull the migraine, she was still too stressed to sleep. Tomorrow she would have to start looking for accommodation, she decided, fighting to stave off a growing sense of panic. Finding somewhere suitable to live would not be easy, because she needed space to work as well. Her jewellery business was currently her family’s only means of support, aside from their small state pensions.

‘Caro?’ The next morning Isabel Hales limped painfully into the kitchen where Caroline was preparing breakfast. ‘Do you think Matthew’s parents would be willing to give us a loan for your sake?’ she asked hopefully

Caroline went pale and tensed. ‘I don’t think so. Settling Matthew’s debts was a matter of pride to them. But they’re not the type to splash out their cash unless it’s likely to benefit them in some way.’

‘If only you’d given them a grandchild everything would have been so different,’ the older woman replied, in a sharp tone of reproach.

‘I know.’ Stinging tears burned the back of Caroline’s lowered eyes. The Baileys had thrown that omission at her as well while she’d still lived with them. Evidently her failure to produce a child had been her worst flaw as a daughter-in-law, but the Baileys had also insinuated that, had she been a better wife, Matthew would have spent more time at home. She’d had a mad desire to tell them the truth about her marriage, but had mercifully contrived to keep a still tongue in her head. She could not even bear to think about the years she had lost to her unhappy marriage, and nobody would benefit from her talking now about what she had kept hidden for so long. It would only devastate Matthew’s parents and shock and upset her own.