off and wash away the smell of where he’d been, and then got dressed in some of his own casual clothes that had hung unworn over the months.
When he opened the fridge it was well stocked and he wondered when Laura had found time to drive up to London to do that. He had the answer when a few seconds later the phone rang and Jenny, his secretary, was on the line, welcoming him home and asking if the food she’d bought him was all right.
‘Laura rang and asked me to do a shop for you,’ she explained.
‘It is fine, Jenny,’ he told her, ‘and many thanks for taking the trouble’
‘It was no trouble. I’m just glad to know you’re home,’ she said awkwardly. ‘Everyone on the unit wants to know when you’re coming back.’
‘It might be if rather than when,’ he replied. ‘I’ve got some thinking to do, Jenny, but I’ll be around to see you all soon.’
He finished his conversation with Jenny, but almost immediately the phone rang again. This time it was Laura.
‘Gabriel! You’re home! Thank goodness! How does it feel?’
‘Quiet, peaceful,’ he replied. ‘Jenny has done what you asked so I’m going to have a snack lunch and then maybe a walk in the park. I see that next door is up for sale. Did you know?’
‘Er, yes. Jeremy phoned to tell me.’
‘Why would he do that, then?’
‘I don’t know. I wasn’t interested and told him so,’ she said levelly, and into the silence that followed added, ‘When are you coming to see the children?’
‘Soon,’ he replied. ‘One day during the week maybe.’
‘I see,’ she replied, and she did. She saw that Gabriel had no intention of taking up where they’d left off on that dreadful afternoon. They’d lived like strangers in the same house after the event while waiting for the case to come up, and she was no more eager than he was to go back to that kind of life.
The move to Swallowbrook hadn’t just been because of her uncle’s generous gift of the house. She’d harboured a secret hope that it might be a new beginning with Gabriel away from the happenings of the past in a beautiful place, but it seemed that he had other ideas and when they’d finished the call she wept for all that they’d lost.
Laura had chaired a meeting of the doctors the night before to discuss a project that was already under way—the building of a clinic for cancer patients that Nathan Gallagher was keen to see take place on the same plot of land as the surgery.
The relevant authorities in the area had approved it and work had already started. The practice building had once been a farmhouse where Libby, his wife, had been brought up, and there was land to spare all around it.
The intention was that the clinic should be an offshoot of the local hospital’s oncology department, which was always extremely busy, and if plans went ahead it would be somewhere for local people to see a consultant without a longer wait than was necessary.
Libby hadn’t been at the meeting. She was retiring from the practice very soon and had suggested that Laura take Sophie and Josh round to their place to play with Toby until it was over.
When she’d dropped them off Libby had thought that the new practice manager looked tired and stressed but hadn’t said anything, as on getting to know her better she was realising that Laura Armitage was a very private person.
The other woman in the practice, Hugo Lawrence’s delightful new wife Ruby, who had joined them as a junior doctor some time ago, had similar feelings about the new practice manager and was doing her best to make her feel at home. She felt that Laura was under pressure of some kind and it was noticeable that there was never any mention of the children’s father in any conversation with her.
Though not so with her young daughter, Sophie was obviously in touch with her father, even if her mother wasn’t, if the number of times she mentioned him was anything to go by.
After speaking to Gabriel on Friday morning, Laura decided that if life had felt unreal ever since he’d come charging in and found the opportunist from next door using her distress to get to know her better, the stilted conversation they’d just had on the phone took unreality into a new dimension.
He still believed she’d been about to cheat on him, she thought. That she’d turned to Jeremy Saunders of all people because of his own neglect of her, and that maybe it hadn’t been the first time. Never having been prepared to discuss it with her since, now he was making it clear that there wasn’t going to be any loving reunion, not as far as he was concerned anyway.
Sleep was long in coming when she went to bed. As she lay wide-eyed beneath the eaves of Swallows Barn, Laura heard Sophie call out his name on a sob and couldn’t believe that Gabriel could stay away from the children now that he was free. If he didn’t want to be with her, fine, but he adored Sophie and Josh, and if he didn’t appear for them soon she would … What? File for divorce and have to live without him for evermore?
CHAPTER TWO
ON THE Sunday after Gabriel’s release from prison, Laura set off with the children for a picnic on an island in the middle of the lake. It was a quiet and peaceful place, uninhabited except for just one property—an attractive house built from lakeland stone and appropriately named Greystone House.
They had told her at the surgery that it belonged to Libby and Nathan Gallagher, that he had bought it for her as a wedding present, and she’d thought how romantic that was. It seemed that the two of them and their small son spent every weekend there.
This Sunday the two doctors were going to the wedding of a friend who lived down south and so there would be no one but her and the children on the island today.
Sophie and Josh were keen to explore everywhere and as it was small enough for her to keep them in view all the time, she was happy to let them wander where they wanted as long as they didn’t trespass on land belonging to the house.
Once they were happily occupied she set out the picnic for when they would be ready to eat, and then opening up the folding chair that she had brought with her settled herself on it and let her thoughts take over.
It hurt that Gabriel hadn’t rushed straight up here to see the children at least, though he obviously had no interest in rebuilding their marriage.
She often thought that if she hadn’t gone to the hospital as his patient that day, he wouldn’t have come home so early, and when Jeremy had taken advantage of her distress, she would have sent him packing without Gabriel knowing anything about it and it would have been the end of the incident.
But Gabriel’s timing had been all wrong and so had Jeremy’s for that matter. They had all paid a high price for what had happened in the moment when his self-control had snapped. She could hear the engines of another passenger launch approaching and she sighed. It had stopped, and the peace she craved would be gone if others had the same thought in mind that she’d had.
Calling Sophie and Josh to her, she began to pour the cold drinks that she’d brought and almost dropped the flask when a shadow fell across her and the children came to a halt as if they’d seen a ghost.
She turned slowly with a tingling down her spine and when she looked up Gabriel was there, observing her gravely, and it was as if the four of them had been turned to stone, until Sophie broke the silence by crying ‘Daddy!’ and began running towards him, with Josh not far behind. As he scooped them up into his arms Laura saw the wetness of tears on his cheeks and thought achingly that this was a moment that none of them should ever have had to endure, but it had been thrust upon them. Where did they go from here?
Desperate to get away from the place where her life had been shattered, she’d spent the time that Gabriel had been away from her and the children picking up the pieces by moving to a new home in a beautiful Lakeland paradise, and although it had only been half a life without him there, she’d coped