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kissed. Guilt-ridden, he had confessed to Roz and it had destroyed her already fragile trust in men. The others knew that Manus had been trying for four years to put things right, but good luck to him, because he was fighting an army of ghosts from her days of being married to the serial adulterer Robert Clegg.
    ‘I wish something would happen to make everything okay,’ Olive went on. ‘That’s what I’d wish for your fortieth birthday. The four of us all together again with our heads full of nothing but laughs. Like we were when we were kids.’
    ‘Me too,’ said Ven. She opened her mouth to go on, but shut it at the last. This had all been in the lap of the gods from day one. She had to keep her trust in them to carry on the good work.

Chapter 6
    On the bus home, Olive studied the cheque for five hundred pounds. Not that she would put it in the bank. Ven had given her this money to buy some cruise-worthy clothes and she had taken it home with her to shut her enthusiastic friend up, but she wouldn’t be going with her on holiday. How could she go? Even if by some miracle she found herself on board, she would be haunted by pictures of Doreen struggling to cope. Doreen wasn’t paralysed, she could walk a little, but it was so hard for her that a wheelchair was necessary. Who would wash her mother-in-law and put her to bed? She couldn’t have her own son doing it, even if his bad back allowed him to lift her. She would spend a fortnight away from them not sleeping for worry, and be scared stiff what she would come home to. A dead old lady in a wheelchair, who had reached in vain for a glass of water that might have saved her before tumbling to the ground? And a man at death’s door in his bed, spine contorted in agony, unable to rise, even to answer the dying pleas of his mother? No, she wouldn’t be going.
    And how could she go back to Cephalonia? How could she return to that island and risk losing the perfect picture of it that she carried with her always? Tanos would no longer be the tiny unspoiled village she recalled. It would be a disco and karaoke-bar-filled horror story by now, because it was too pretty not to be commercialised. Going back there would remind her too painfully of the one dream she had managed to live out – flying off and working in a bar one hot summer twenty years ago. When she was young and brave and free to go where she wanted in that small window of opportunity – when she was Lyon by name and Lion by nature. Then the guilty feelings had set in, taunting her that she shouldn’t be gallivanting about having a good time when she had aged parents to look after. So she had torn herself away from the island, back to her familiar life of drudgery, to be charmed by David Hardcastle and his fancy ambitious talk. No, she couldn’t bear to go back. Although her heart had never left.
    As Olive stepped into her mother-in-law’s fag-smoky house and saw the mountain of ironing awaiting her before her shift cleaning the offices up the road, she felt the weight of duty on her shoulders and her eyes filled up with tears. Talk of this cruise had stirred up too many muddy waters inside her. Or rather, azure-blue waters with gentle waves, little fishes and a salty Greek tang.

Chapter 7
    Manus dragged his hands down his face in despair. He couldn’t believe he’d got it wrong again. But here was his partner bollocking him for helping to arrange for her to go on a free cruise with her mates.
    ‘I didn’t suspect a thing,’ Roz had thrown at him.
    ‘But that was the idea, love!’
    ‘Quite the little secret-keeper, aren’t you?’ she sniped.
    Manus shook his head slowly and resignedly. He didn’t want to fight again. He’d had four years of fighting with this woman whom he loved so much. It crushed him that he couldn’t get through to her. They rarely made love these days, and even when they did he felt that she was just going through the motions so she had an excuse not to ‘do it’ again