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possessions, too much money. Jake had adored her, and the baby, when he came, was absolutely delicious. But then he'd begun teething and he'd had whooping cough and was fretful and tetchy after it, and wasn't quite so delicious any longer. The novelty of her new lifestyle had quickly begun to wear off, coincidentally with two other things happening. First, Ty Andreas had come into her life, via the Greek restaurant where he worked as a waiter. Then her mother's new husband had written to order Naomi from then on to take responsibility for her elder child, the one she'd never told Jake about. He said it was high time her mother had the opportunity to enjoy a life of her own, she shouldn't be saddled with someone else's six-year-old, it wasn't right at her age. It had been time to pick up the child and move on.
    Naomi hadn't initially intended her decampment to be permanent. One day she would come back to Jake and Matthew, of course she would; but somehow the years, mostly in Greece but also on the island of Corfu, Italy, America, Spain, had stretched out. And even after Ty had been killed in a taverna brawl and she'd left the others (or they'd left her) she hadn't been able to summon up the energy to return. By then, she and Jake were divorced, anyway.
    Since then, there had always been problems with money, but that was something which had never been important to her and she'd grown used to managing on hardly anything. She never seriously considered taking up her work again where she'd left off, although she'd had talent – oh yes, outstanding talent, it had been said more than once. You needed more than that to succeed, however – hard work and stickability, for instance – concepts which bored Naomi. In the end, the money had run out completely and even her Micawberish view of life began to waver. Nothing – or, as was more usual in Naomi's case – nobody, had turned up to save her this time. Until her mother had left her the house.
    'It's good. It's good to be here and not always going somewhere else,' said Cassie, child of too many disruptive moves, after they had settled in. 'We should stay here.'
    'Well, we'll see. It all depends.'
    It was a very small house, though it had three bedrooms if you counted the attic. But the unexpected legacy had given them shelter for the last months, if no income, and the house, occupied for years by various tenants, was in a terrible condition. Unspeakable things must be happening under the roof slates, because the ceilings were sagging; some of the floors were rotten, paint was peeling everywhere and the front fence was falling down. Naomi's housekeeping was sluttish, and she could easily shut her eyes to the state of the house, but she was still practically on her beam ends, so much so that she'd put the house on the market. She hadn't even had a nibble. The sign still stood, planted drunkenly in the front plot, bindweed climbing up its post and threatening to obliterate its message.
    Oh, she'd been mad, mad to come back! And not least because Nigel might well hear of her return. She was putty in the hands of any persuasive man, and Nigel was nothing if not persuasive. And, she had no need to remind herself, very nasty when roused.
    But what could he do? Automatically, she touched the wood of the tree trunk. All her life she'd been irredeemably superstitious, believing implicitly in luck, good or bad. It was astonishing that she still had the one thing he had coveted, intact, that it had survived all that had happened to her, that she hadn't lost or misplaced it somewhere along the way. Most of everything else she'd ever possessed was scattered somewhere around the globe, marking her progress like an animal's spoor.
    And anyway, he probably had no need of it now, after all these years. But she knew Nigel and his persistence and was tempted briefly, just for a second. Why not give in and be done with it? It was of no conceivable use to her; she would, in fact, feel