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properly grieved for, had never been allowed to be acknowledged...because she had never been able to mourn its loss and share what she was feeling with others.
    But how could she have shared it? To share it would have meant admitting what had happened, revealing what she had done, how she had behaved.
    Did she really want other people to know about that? Look how Jake Lucas had reacted. Did she really want to see that same contempt in other people’s eyes, to know that people were talking about her behind her back, discussing what she had done...? And besides, it was all too late, over fifteen years too late.
    But no matter how logically she tried to argue with herself, she still felt emotional and on edge. The thought of having to spend the next eight months or so listening to her sister talking about her pregnancy and making plans for the eventual birth of her baby made her stomach churn with tension and anxiety.
    She felt as though emotionally she was stretched so tightly, so over-wound inside, that she was almost on the verge of snapping completely.
    What had happened to her? This time last week she had been perfectly all right... Hadn’t she? All right, so she hadn’t wanted to attend the Hopkinses’ christening, and thinking about it had brought everything back, resurrected the pain she was increasingly conscious of having to suppress, but she had been to other christenings and had coped. What had been so special about this one, other than the fact that Jake Lucas had been there?
    Jake Lucas. It was his fault she was feeling like this, she decided bitterly. It was because of him that she couldn’t enjoy the news of her sister’s pregnancy, couldn’t react with the unshadowed pleasure and enthusiasm she wanted to feel.
    Jake Lucas... If only he hadn’t been there that night... If only he hadn’t opened the door and seen... It had all been over then anyway, her frightened struggles to escape from his cousin’s too powerful grip long since subdued and the damage done.
    Jake Lucas. She hated and loathed him almost as much as he despised her. She smiled bitterly to herself. Much he would care. Still, she very much doubted that he was used to being on the receiving end of such a negative emotion from her sex. He was, physically at least, a very attractive and compelling man—even she could see that—the kind of man she would have expected to have had a string of women passing through his life, but oddly he seemed not to do so. He had a wide social circle of friends, but if he had a serious personal relationship with anyone it had not reached the town’s very efficient grapevine.
    Good-looking, comparatively wealthy and, according to everyone else, with the kind of personality that immediately drew others towards him, he still remained single.
    ‘Rumour has it that he fell in love with someone years ago and that he’s never got over it,’ Chrissie had once remarked, but Rosie had found it hard to believe her. Jake Lucas, in love? He was too hard, too detached, his opinion of himself far too high to allow him to admit into his life the turbulence of an emotion like love.
    It took most of the morning for her to help her client fill in her claims forms. The burglary had upset her, and left her feeling nervous and insecure, and Rosie, who had come across the same thing with other clients who had suffered similar robberies, let her talk, knowing that this was the best thing she could do.
    Would she have felt any different, would her life been any different, if there had been someone for her to talk to? But how did you tell someone, anyone, anything like that? To explain what had happened, how her baby had been conceived in the first place, would have been hard enough, but then to go on to discuss her mixed and contradictory feelings over her miscarriage... How could she tell anyone of the relief she had first felt...relief at the death of her child, and then go on to expect them to believe how later her feelings had