the time taken away from her own girls, and hated the stress-inducing moments when the clock was ticking and she was going to be late (again) for the pub. It was like having all the disadvantages of marriage without the sex.
‘Come on, Sammy, let’s have a cuddle before we take the girls to school,’ she said. Sam, she’d noticed, loved to be tickled and played with in the mornings. She wondered if it was because Joel didn’t quite know how to – although for all her carping, Joel was clearly devoted to Sam, he just hadn’t had much practice looking after him, and it showed.
‘Maybe we should teach him, eh?’ said Lauren, and she was rewarded with a great big smile as she tickled Sam’s chin. ‘Get that silly daddy to see what he’s been missing.’
Chapter Three
It was dark, just the way she liked it. Kezzie had forgotten the sheer dizzying excitement of guerrilla gardening. She felt the familiar frisson of being out on a moonlit night, in the middle of nowhere. Ever since she’d stumbled across the decaying garden a couple of weeks earlier, she’d been determined to make a statement to whoever the owner of the garden was. Presumably someone must own it. Shocking, how such a beautiful place could be left so neglected. Whoever it belonged to, clearly didn’t value it as they should.
She found the oak tree, from the which vantage point she had peered into the garden last time she was here. She hooked herself up, heart pounding, before swinging her legs from the tree to the wall, and jumping down into the garden. She rummaged round in her bag for her torch, then decided she didn’t need it. The moon was so bright she could clearly make out the contours of what had once been an orderly and well-managed garden. Overgrown with weeds it might be now, but it was obvious that once upon a time someone had lavished a lot of care and attention here.
On the far side was an ornate iron gate, with steps leading down into the garden. There were borders running round the edges, which were full of weeds creeping over the paths, and in the square in the centre was a tangled mass of ivy and rosemary and box. She spotted the rusting iron bench near where she had landed, so she put her rucksack down on it while surveying the scene. An owl hooted nearby, startling her, and she could hear the sound of foxes fighting, not far away. It gave an added thrill to what she was doing. She felt like Rapunzel’s dad, stealing lettuces in the dark. Any minute now an ugly witch would appear.
She opened her rucksack and pulled out the garden clippers, fork and trowel she’d brought with her. The garden was hideously overgrown, but she could make out an ancient hedge – box? Probably, it looked like it had been a border once – beneath the weeds. Taking her clippers, she started to hack back at the brambles and convolvulus threatening to strangle it. As she worked, she tried not to think about the night she’d done this in London – the night she’d met Richard, the night her life had changed forever. If she hadn’t broken into the rough patch of ground by the posh gated community, where he lived in Clapham, and planted daffodils, she’d never have met him at all. He was on his way home and he’d accused her of vandalism, until she pointed out that you couldn’t vandalize something you were trying to improve.
A couple of months later, when the daffodils were blooming and he’d found her admiring her handiwork, he’d grudgingly admitted that she was right and her efforts had transformed a scrubby patch of ground into a little haven of green in the city.
‘You should do that for a living,’ he said. ‘You seem to have a way with plants.’
‘I’ve got a job,’ Kezzie had replied defiantly, not wanting to admit that designing logos for a company that advertised on the web wasn’t really fulfilling her. It turned out that Richard was an architect specializing in garden design, and he encouraged her to train up in her spare time. One thing led to another, and before long she’d found herself agreeing to move in with him, and giving up her job, once she’d finished her course in landscape gardening. Of course, none of it had worked to plan, her job giving up on her, before she had a chance to resign, and then losing Richard before she’d moved in. Something she had simply never thought would happen …
Richard had been a revelation to her. He was completely unlike any of the boyfriends she’d had before. Kezzie had had the unfortunate habit of spending most of her teens and her early twenties attracted to the wrong kind of guy, and after a disastrous liaison with a small-time drugs dealer had forsworn men, until just before her thirtieth birthday when she’d met Richard.
For starters it was unusual for Kezzie to be dating someone with a job – let alone someone like Richard in his late thirties, with such a high-powered job. Not only that, with a failed marriage behind him (‘She left me, sadly,’ he’d explained to Kezzie that he’d have done anything to make the marriage work, but his ex had been equally determined to move on), Richard also had a fourteen-year-old daughter, Emily. Kezzie didn’t even know anyone who had a baby, let alone a full grown teen. That aspect of things hadn’t been ideal, Emily being as unkeen on Kezzie as Kezzie was on her, but Kezzie had been overawed by the trendy, open-plan loft living apartment Richard had owned near Clapham Junction and ashamed to take him back to her small rented flat in Finsbury Park. But Richard was totally unfazed by the differences between their lifestyles – or some of them at any rate, later on it would be all too clear that he disapproved of the drug taking and late night partying – but to begin with he’d said, ‘We’re not that different, you and I.’
‘Really?’ Kezzie was incredulous. She stared at his fair hair, public school boy good looks and his smart shirt and Armani suit. ‘We inhabit different planets.’
‘Maybe we do now,’ said Richard, ‘but I didn’t always earn good money. And I might have gone to public school but my parents worked hard to get me there. My dad ran a pub you know. I spent most of my time at school pretending he owned a chain of hotels.’
Kezzie laughed, ‘And I used to lie to people about which estate I grew up on.’
‘See,’ said Richard, with his crooked grin, which made her fold up and melt inside, ‘not so different after all. I don’t pay any attention to trappings. They don’t mean anything. It’s the person inside who counts.’
And of course, that was how it had all gone so wrong. She had turned out to be different from the person he thought she was.
‘That was then, this is now,’ growled Kezzie to herself and continued with her work, while trying to put painful thoughts of Richard and what might have been behind her.
As she worked, she cleared away the brambles and began to see the box was really out of shape and ragged. Once upon a time, though, it had clearly formed a pattern, woven into which was rosemary and a kind of ivy she couldn’t identify.
What was hidden in this wonderful place? Ever since the day she’d climbed up the oak tree and peeked over the wall, she’d fallen in love with this secret garden, and it looked like it was about to surrender some of its secrets to her.
The more she uncovered, the more excited she grew – the box, ivy and rosemary definitely formed an interconnecting pattern. Eventually she uncovered enough to see it was in the shape of a heart.
Suddenly, she realized what she was looking at; she’d studied this kind of design. ‘It’s a knot garden,’ she said out loud. ‘That’s amazing.’
A security light flooded through the iron gate. She looked up and saw to her surprise there were lights on in the derelict house she’d seen the other week. A torch was bobbing its way down the garden. Shit. Although she’d imagined someone must own the house, it had looked so ramshackle, she’d assumed no one was living in it. She must have made a mistake. Gathering up her things, she ran to the corner of the wall and slung her bag over the top. She was scrambling up the wall, trying to grab for the branches of the oak tree, when—
‘What the hell are you doing in my garden?’ said a distinctly male and very attractive voice.
‘Um—’ Suddenly Kezzie felt very foolish. She had a feeling that guerrilla gardening might not quite have made it to this quiet corner of Sussex …
Joel shone his torch into the