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and she realised that the window in which she could make David take this dog back and have it live with him and Jennifer was rapidly vanishing.
    Her beautiful boys were waving David goodbye, their eyes full of tears they weren’t quite old enough to hide, and he was slinking into his car and revving the engine, and then suddenly, he was pulling away, and she was left with two hyperactive boys, all their washing and a Labrador puppy.
    Zoe felt something warm and wet on her hands.
    A Labrador puppy that had just weed on her.
    Bloody, bloody David.

5
    Rachel woke to the sensation of morning sun and warm breath on her face and assumed she was in bed with Oliver, in her own flat, in London. The house and the dogs? It must all have been a weird dream.
    Her heart flooded with relief, but when she opened her eyes, it wasn’t Oliver’s come-to-bed expression she saw, but a long black nose, and – when her eyes focused properly – two ice-blue eyes.
    Gem was standing with his paws on the duvet, leaning over her anxiously and making faint whiny noises. Rachel realised with horror that he’d been licking her. She could feel a dog hair on, or up, her nose.
    ‘Urgh!’ Rachel sat up, rubbing her face, and immediately he dropped back onto the floor and retreated to the far corner of the room, where he regarded her balefully.
    ‘That. Is. Disgusting. Is that how everyone wakes up round here?’ she demanded.
    Gem said nothing.
    Rachel sank back into the pillows and stared sightlessly at the chalk sketch of a sultry dark-haired woman that hung on the wall opposite.
    She was definitely not in London. She’d been here three days now, and she hadn’t even started on the sorting out, let alone reading the file on probate Gerald had given her. All she’d done was call the estate agent to value the house and lie to Val about searching for the bloody silver brushes.
    Rachel let her gaze trail listlessly around the room, wondering if checking out the heavy Victorian furniture and unusual trinkets counted as getting on with sorting out the valuation of the house contents. Her attention was dragged back to the heavy-lidded femme fatale on the opposite wall, her proud expression burning out from under a backcombed bouffant of jet-black hair.
    Might keep that, thought Rachel. It looked quite a lot like her, when she did the full make-up job on her brown eyes. It was signed with a squiggle, and Paris, 1966.
    She wondered what time it was, although that wouldn’t make much difference since everyone seemed to operate on Country Hours here. George Fenwick had dropped by at nine a.m. yesterday to give her a lecture about the importance of moving some of the rescue dogs out of the kennels and into new homes. She’d been in her pyjamas at the time, and Megan had had to drag her out of bed specially, but that hadn’t apparently struck him as a reason to come back later.
    ‘You can’t afford to have them sitting here scoffing themselves silly,’ he’d pointed out while eating the breakfast Freda Shackley had put under his nose. ‘You’re the PR expert – how hard would it be for you to do a nice little campaign to shift them on? It’s what Dot would have wanted – new homes for her old dogs. That is part of your duty as executor.’
    ‘I’ll put it on my list,’ Rachel had said. Her lists were now epic. But apart from lying on the bed feeling numb for hours on end, the only time she left the house – at Megan’s suggestion – was to trudge round the fields outside the house with Gem, during which she’d rehearsed all the brilliant and devastating things she would say to Oliver if he ever dared show his face round here.
    Rachel had made herself cry several times. Gem had said nothing but had lain with his head on her lap for the first time when they’d got in.
    Downstairs, she could hear distant barking and the bang of the front door, which heralded the arrival of the volunteer walkers. In the brief flashes when she wasn’t feeling