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changed completely, and how guilty she had felt? As though in some way she had actually willed the miscarriage on herself.
    Had there been any repercussions? Jake Lucas had asked her curtly the day he had come to see her.
    ‘No,’ she had told him stoically, denying the truth, keeping it secret and hidden, just as she had gone on keeping it secret and hidden ever since; but she had lied: there had been repercussions then and there still were now, echoing agonisingly through her life, through her.
    These days there was counselling available to people who suffered trauma, but at sixteen she had been too young, and much too ashamed and frightened, to have sought out any kind of professional advice even if she had been aware that she could have done so.
    All she had wanted to do when she left the hospital was to put the whole thing behind her, to lock it away in the darkest, most hidden recesses of her mind, where it could lie forgotten.
    Only her guilt had not allowed her to forget it; it had driven her, relentlessly sharpened by pain. And it had been a twofold guilt.
    Initially she had felt shame and anxiety because of what she had done because, even though she knew they would do all they could to help her, her parents would be hurt. She had not thought about the baby then, that had come later...a secondary and much, much worse guilt, a deep, more intense feeling of having failed another human being, of having let them down and caused them to suffer. Her baby had died and, even though logically she knew such things happened, she still felt that she was to blame, that somehow her baby had known that it was not loved...not wanted and that because of that...
    And now Chrissie was having a third child. Rosie gripped the steering-wheel tightly.
    She was not going to allow herself to be envious of her sister, to spoil the relationship she had with her with feelings of useless envy, to spoil the relationship she would one day have with her new niece or nephew with unhappiness for the child she had lost.
    It was just gone lunchtime when she got home. On Saturday morning she normally got up early and drove into town to do her food shopping, while everywhere was relatively quiet, but today, because of her business appointment, that had not been possible, and now she realised she was virtually out of fresh food.
    Not that it mattered. She didn’t really feel very hungry.
    But she really ought to have something to eat, an inner voice nagged her. Neglecting her health wasn’t going to solve anything or make her feel any better, was it?
    Grimly she pulled open the fridge door and surveyed its contents without any real enthusiasm and then closed it again.
    The hot, sunny weather had continued all week, and her garden, especially the pots of flowers and herbs by the back door, all needed watering.
    Originally built to house farm workers, her cottage had a very good-sized rear garden, which had been one of the main reasons Rosie had bought it in the first place.
    Last summer, much to Chrissie’s exasperation, she had painstakingly laid a pretty, small, stone-paved area outside the back door.
    It had taken up virtually all her spare time for the whole of the summer, and Chrissie had told her forthrightly that she would have been wiser to pay someone else to do the work, leaving herself with enough free time to concentrate on her own social life.
    ‘Honestly, Rosie,’ she had told her. ‘Anyone would think you wanted to be on your own. Every time anyone asks you for a date you tell them that you can’t because you’re working on that patio.’
    Rosie had said nothing, not wanting to admit to her sister that inadvertently she had hit upon the truth.
    Rosie assumed that it was because her job brought her into contact with so many men that she was constantly being asked out, unaware that it was her looks and personality that were really responsible for their interest.
    ‘What’s wrong with you?’ Chrissie had demanded with sisterly