Chapter 1
The rain began somewhere south of Doncaster and followed the train all the way north.
At first Lana watched it with the vague concentration of someone who had been awake for too long, tracing the streaks across the glass while warehouses, flat winter fields and rows of damp brick houses passed in a blur beyond them. By York, the sky had lowered so completely that the afternoon seemed almost finished, although it was barely three. She had switched her phone off before leaving King's Cross and had not dared turn it on since. The last time she looked there had been thirty-seven missed calls, eleven voicemails and enough messages to make the screen feel dangerous in her hand.
Emma had called repeatedly. So had Lana's office, two numbers she suspected belonged to journalists and a police officer who had spent most of Wednesday asking questions in a voice so calm that it had made the situation seem even more unreal.
Andrew had not called at all.
Two days earlier, Lana had believed the worst thing that could happen to a nine-year relationship was discovering that the man beside whom she had slept almost every night had been having an affair. By Wednesday afternoon, the affair had been relegated to a detail in a story considerably larger and uglier.
Andrew Fraser, finance director of a privately owned investment company in London, had apparently spent the better part of eighteen months moving company money through accounts and companies none of his colleagues knew existed. Nobody yet seemed certain of the exact amount. Two million pounds was the figure being repeated most often, although one of the detectives had warned her it might rise considerably once the auditors finished tracing the transfers.
Andrew had left the country on Tuesday evening.
He had flown to Miami and, according to the information the police had, boarded another flight to Grand Cayman the following morning.
There was something almost insulting about that last detail. Two years earlier, while planning a holiday, Lana had once suggested the Cayman Islands because she had seen photographs of the beaches. Andrew had dismissed them as expensive, dull and full of bankers.
She had nearly laughed when the police officer told her where he was believed to be.
Instead, she had been sick in the bathroom of the flat they shared in Islington.
By Thursday morning her name had begun appearing in online articles describing her as Andrew Fraser's "long-term partner". The wording made her sound less like a person than an asset somebody had forgotten to freeze. Police had searched the flat, copied the contents of several devices and taken boxes of documents from Andrew's study. His company had suspended senior staff, issued a statement and retained lawyers. Andrew's own solicitor had made it clear that he was not authorised to say where his client was.
Lana had packed one suitcase.
She had not made a plan beyond that.
Scarborough had come to her at King's Cross almost as an instinct. Susan's house had been empty for seven months, waiting for a buyer Lana and Emma had never been particularly enthusiastic about finding, and Lana still carried a set of keys in the bottom of her handbag because she kept forgetting to post them to the estate agent.
When the train left York, she knew she was going there.
She just did not know for how long.
Scarborough station looked smaller than she remembered, although Lana had begun to suspect that this happened to most places revisited after adulthood. The red brick, the ironwork, the long platform beneath a wet grey sky were all familiar enough to be disorientating. For a moment she had the uncomfortable sensation that she was a student again, returning from Leeds with too much laundry and not enough money.
Then the wind caught her coat and reminded her that she was an adult, exhausted, professionally competent, financially independent and being contacted by the Metropolitan Police because the man she had intended to spend her life with had apparently stolen a fortune.
She considered joining the taxi queue but it was long, and walking gave her something physical to do. She dragged the suitcase through streets that had changed without ever becoming unrecognisable. There were expensive coffee shops where tired cafés had once stood and vaping stores where she remembered buying CDs. A pub that had served her and Richard when neither had any business being served alcohol was now a pharmacy. Several shopfronts seemed to have been waiting stubbornly since the late nineties for someone to decide what to do with them.
Further downhill, the first glimpse of the sea appeared between buildings, flat and silver beneath the November cloud.
Lana turned away from it and continued towards the street where she had grown up.
Number seventeen was near the top of the terrace, its front facing directly into the weather that had been wearing at the Yorkshire coast for generations. Susan had painted the door blue shortly after the divorce, choosing a shade David Morgan had once declared "too bright". Over the years it had faded almost to grey, but Lana could still remember her mother standing on the pavement in old jeans, paint on one cheek, looking at the finished door with the satisfaction of someone who had won a minor but deeply personal war.
The house had become Susan's in every sense long before it became hers legally.
David had moved out when Lana was ten and Emma eleven. The divorce had not been mysterious. He had fallen in love with a woman he worked with, admitted it eventually and moved to Leeds within months. For a while he had driven back most weekends, determined to prove that leaving Susan did not mean leaving his daughters, but the arrangement had softened over time. Emma, always more forgiving and better organised, remained close to him. Lana did not quarrel with him so much as gradually stop expecting very much. There were birthdays, occasional weekends, Christmas lunches, later dinners in London when work brought him south. He married again, divorced again, and died suddenly from a heart attack in 2016 while walking from his office to his car.
Lana had cried when Emma called.
She had loved him. She had also realised, while sitting at his funeral, that almost none of the rooms in which she remembered growing up contained him.
They contained Susan.
Susan cooking in this kitchen. Susan shouting up the stairs that Lana would miss the bus. Susan arguing with Richard through the open front window because he had parked across the gate again. Susan pruning roses she never quite managed to keep alive. Susan sitting in the back room with a blanket over her knees during the last months of her illness, furious with anyone who spoke to her as though she were already dying.
Lana stood on the pavement with the rain settling into her hair and put the key into the lock.
It stuck.
"Of course it does."
She lifted the handle, twisted harder and shouldered the door until it gave abruptly enough to make her stumble into the hallway.
The smell stopped her.
Old wood, lavender polish, cold fabric and something that was simply Susan's house and had never existed anywhere else.
Nothing had been properly moved since the funeral. Her mother's reading glasses still sat on the telephone table beside a ceramic bowl full of coins. A stack of post had accumulated beneath them. The brown wool coat Susan had worn almost every winter for fifteen years remained hooked behind the kitchen door because neither Lana nor Emma had been able to decide what to do with it.
Seeing it hurt more than the cemetery had.
Lana took off her own coat and left it over a chair.
The kitchen light failed when she flicked the switch. The second attempt produced a brief pulse of yellow light, followed by a click somewhere beneath the stairs and darkness throughout the house.
She stood in the middle of the kitchen.
"Fantastic."
Her voice sounded too loud in the empty room.
The boiler did not start either.
She tried the fuse box, succeeded in restoring the hallway for approximately three seconds and then plunged the entire house into darkness again.
By then it was raining hard enough against the windows to make returning outside unattractive.
Lana took her phone from her handbag, used the torch and went upstairs in search of candles.
The back bedroom had become the family graveyard of objects nobody wanted but nobody had quite thrown away. Christmas decorations, school books, old suitcases and cardboard boxes were stacked beneath the window. Lana opened one looking for matches and found instead several albums and an envelope from Boots with AUGUST 2008 written across it in Susan's hand.
She sat down before she understood why.
There had been a time when photographs arrived like this, days or weeks after the event, with no opportunity to remove the embarrassing ones before another person saw them. Lana slid the prints from the envelope and moved through them slowly.
Susan in the garden with a glass of wine.
Emma, home from university, asleep in a deckchair.
Tom Barrett holding a burnt sausage with exaggerated despair.
A group of people Lana recognised but could no longer immediately name.
Then Richard.
She stopped.
Richard leaned against his silver Vauxhall, his hair falling untidily over his forehead and a half-smile suggesting the photograph was not his idea. Lana stood in front of him in narrow jeans and a white vest Susan had considered indecent because it exposed several centimetres of stomach.
Richard's arm was around her waist.
Her body remembered before her mind did.
The photograph had been taken at a barbecue near the end of that summer. Ten minutes earlier they had been behind the garden shed, kissing hard enough that Richard's hand had found its way beneath the white vest and Susan had eventually shouted through the kitchen window that dinner was being served with or without them.
Lana closed her eyes.
For years she had filed 2008 under first love and left it there, flattened by distance into something tender, foolish and safely finished.
The reality had been less manageable.
They had grown up close by, though four years had once seemed enormous. Richard lived in a nearby street, the older boy who fixed bicycle chains and let Lana and Emma follow him further than they were supposed to go. Number twenty-five still belonged to Mr Harcourt then; Richard would not buy it until years later. Somewhere in adolescence, Lana had stopped seeing him merely as Richard. By that summer, pretending had become impossible.
That summer they had been ridiculous about each other.
There had been no gentle transition from friendship to romance. Years of familiarity had collapsed almost immediately into something physical and greedy. They kissed everywhere. In cars, alleyways, Susan's kitchen, the back row of the cinema, against the side of the house after midnight while rain soaked both of them through. Lana had learned the weight of Richard's body before she had learned how to live alone. He had been her first serious lover, the first person she had trusted with the whole of herself and the first person capable of making her furious in ways that felt indistinguishable from pain.
Then September arrived.
Richard went to Manchester to begin his engineering degree after two years working locally and saving money. Lana went to Leeds to study marketing and communications. They were suddenly more than a hundred miles apart after years in which only a few streets had separated them.
They tried.
For months they lived through cheap train tickets, late-night calls, jealous silences, missed weekends and arguments that began over nothing and ended with one of them hanging up. Every visit was intense enough to convince them the relationship would survive. Every departure seemed to undo the repair.
By spring, the distance had turned them into people neither liked very much.
Richard ended it by text after Lana had hung up on him three times in one evening.
She had hated him for that.
He had hated her for making him do it.
The following Christmas they spoke for perhaps five minutes in The Ship and spent the rest of the evening pretending not to look at one another.
After that, adulthood happened.
Lana stared at the photograph in her hand until a knock sounded downstairs.
Not tentative.
Three firm knocks, followed by another three.
She went still.
Then a man's voice carried through the door.
"Lana?"
Everything inside her recognised it.
"Lana, open the door. Mrs Kelly says you've killed the electricity."
For one absurd second she considered not answering.
Then she stood.
By the time she reached the hall, her heart was beating much too quickly.
She opened the door.
Richard Hale stood on the step with rain darkening the shoulders of his jacket and a toolbox in one hand.
He had changed.
Only seeing him made the years feel real.
His hair was shorter and threaded with grey at the temples. His face was leaner and harder around the jaw, the softness she remembered gone, with the beginning of lines beside his eyes. He was broader than she remembered, not dramatically, but enough that the jacket sat differently across his shoulders.
The eyes were unchanged.
So was the expression that appeared when he saw her.
For several seconds neither spoke.
Then Richard exhaled.
"Jesus Christ."
Lana laughed.
It escaped before she could decide whether she wanted to.
"That's the best you've got?"
"I wasn't expecting to need an opening line."
"You've had seventeen years."
"I assumed we'd continue avoiding one another until one of us died."
His voice was older. Lower.
Otherwise, he sounded exactly like Richard.
Something in Lana loosened and tightened at the same time.
He lifted the toolbox slightly.
"Mrs Kelly saw you arrive."
"Mrs Kelly is still alive?"
"Eighty-six and fuelled entirely by information about other people's lives."
"She must be delighted."
"She rang me before you'd been here ten minutes."
Lana glanced towards the dark hallway.
"Apparently I broke the house."
"You were always destructive."
"You used to enjoy that."
The sentence left her before she thought about it.
Richard's eyes returned to hers.
There was the smallest pause.
Enough.
"Can I come in?"
Lana moved aside.
Richard entered the hallway and immediately saw Susan's coat hanging behind the kitchen door.
The change in him was so swift that Lana almost wished he had not noticed it.
He stood still for a moment.
"I'm sorry, Lan."
He had attended the funeral, standing near the back of the church among people Susan had known all her life. Andrew had been beside Lana then, one hand at her elbow, solid and apparently dependable.
She and Richard had exchanged four sentences outside.
"Thank you."
Richard looked at the coat once more before turning towards the cupboard beneath the stairs.
"Fuse box still here?"
"Unless Mum moved it for entertainment."
He gave her a faint smile and crouched in front of it.
Lana leaned against the wall.
Watching him should not have felt intimate.
It did.
He moved with the same economical concentration she remembered, sleeves pushed back, one hand steadying the cupboard door while the other checked switches. There was no wedding ring.
She noticed immediately and resented herself for noticing.
Richard glanced over his shoulder.
"What?"
"Nothing."
"You still lie badly."
"You still assume everything concerns you."
"Not everything."
The lights came back.
The refrigerator began humming in the kitchen. Somewhere upstairs the old radio alarm clock Susan had never unplugged started flashing midnight.
Lana looked around.
"Useful."
"It's a breaker."
"You've become modest."
"I've become expensive."
He stood and closed the cupboard.
Only then did his attention settle properly on the suitcase near the door.
"How long are you staying?"
"I don't know."
Richard waited.
Lana had spent two days answering questions carefully. Every word to the police had felt as though it might matter later, and conversations with colleagues had been worse because sympathy inevitably became curiosity.
She had no intention of telling Richard anything.
Then she heard herself say, "Andrew stole about two million pounds from his company and ran away to the Cayman Islands."
Richard stared.
Lana continued because the sentence had already destroyed any hope of dignity.
"He was also sleeping with somebody called Sophie for over a year, although at this point that feels almost administratively irrelevant."
Richard put the toolbox down very slowly.
"Andrew?"
"Yes."
"Your Andrew?"
"He wasn't communal property."
"Two million?"
"Possibly more."
"And he's gone?"
"Miami first. Grand Cayman afterwards. Unless he's moved again."
Richard looked at her properly then, and for the first time since opening the door Lana felt the exhaustion of the previous forty-eight hours return.
"Christ, Lan."
"That has been the general consensus."
His gaze moved over her face, the wet ends of her hair, the coat still lying across the chair.
"Have you eaten?"
The question was so ordinary that she almost laughed.
"No."
"Come to mine."
"I can feed myself."
"You have no gas."
"I have a microwave."
"You also have no heating."
"It's not Antarctica."
"It's Scarborough in November."
Lana folded her arms.
"Where exactly is yours?"
"Twenty-five."
She looked at him.
"Mr Harcourt's?"
"I bought it in 2018."
"You live four houses away?"
"Yes."
"Mum never told me."
For the first time since arriving, Richard looked uncomfortable.
"She knew."
That was not the same thing.
Lana waited, but he did not elaborate.
He picked up the toolbox.
"I've got food on. Come over."
She should have refused simply because agreeing felt too easy.
Instead she reached for her coat.
