Where I Found You. Amanda Brooke

must have a sixth sense when it comes to locating her grandsons,’ Maggie said wryly.

      ‘I’ll get it,’ James said as if there had been any dispute.

      Maggie began scraping her spatula against the bottom of the bowl as she sought out the last pockets of cocoa powder that hadn’t been incorporated into the mix. A quick taste test confirmed that the icing tasted as good as it smelled and she could almost forgive Sam for giving into temptation. But these thoughts barely registered and her stirring slowed as Maggie listened to one half of a conversation between mother and son.

      ‘Yes, the traffic wasn’t bad for a bank holiday weekend,’ James was telling her.

      Maggie used the spatula to push the mixture towards one side of the bowl as she heard James answer more questions about his early morning journey. It took a couple of minutes for Judith to get around to the real reason she had phoned.

      ‘I’ll have to check with Maggie first. We wanted to spend as much time with the boys as we can.’

      Maggie didn’t need to hear the other side of the conversation to know that her mother-in-law was trying to engineer some time of her own with the boys. Judith would be persistent; she liked to get her own way and with James she usually did. It was this apparent hold on him that terrified Maggie. Fixing gates and trips out with the grandchildren were one thing but Judith had views on James’s future too and Maggie suspected she wasn’t a part of that vision.