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still had some left from three years ago. By now, it would taste of almonds on the tongue.
    She closed her eyes. Nick had died from a blood clot which stopped the flow of oxygen to his brain. He’d had a massive stroke. He wasn’t even forty. And Rosemary was left alone.
    She realised that she was gripping the basket of sloes, white-knuckled.
Breathe, Rosemary
. The horror of it had never gone away. She had moved, unknowing, into some sort of dark place where she could survive, and she didn’t even know, now, where that place was, how she had got there or what had happened to the people around her.
    Rosemary took her large colander from the low cupboard left of the sink and shook in the sloes, ensuring that all the fruit was good, that she removed anything that was beginning to rot. She turned on the tap to wash them.
    She came out of that dark place when her father grabbed her by the arm one day when she’d come to pick up Eva. Rosemary worked full time now. They needed the moneyand, besides, work was a distraction. When she was typing up a legal document or speaking to clients on the phone, she didn’t have to think about what had happened. That she was now Rosemary Gatsby, widow. That her husband was dead. That, really, life should not have gone on.
    ‘What?’ Rosemary waited. Eva was still playing outside.
    ‘She’s just a child,’ her father said.
    ‘What do you mean? I know she’s a child.’ She frowned.
    ‘I mean that you’ve got to pull yourself together, Rosie.’ He put a hand on her arm. He was pleading with her.
    She tried to tug her arm away, but he held fast. How could he possibly understand? How could anyone? Her world had no foundations anymore, no anchor. ‘All very well for you to say,’ she snapped. ‘Do you ever think what it’s like for me?’
    He sighed, let her go. ‘All the time,’ he said. ‘All the time. But you’re her mother. It’s your job to think what it’s like for her.’
    ‘I don’t think I can do that job,’ she had told him. ‘Not anymore.’ At least not in the way he expected her to. Since the cards had fallen, there seemed to be little reason to do anything. Why bother to get up in the morning when there was no one beside you to turn to? Why bother to clean the house? Make dinner? Pay the bills? Eva was the only reason Rosemary dragged herself out of bed at seven-thirty. The reason she shopped and cooked. The reason she forced herself to function.
    ‘You’ve got to move on, Rosie,’ he told her, his blue eyes burning with the need to get it through to her. ‘It’s not easy.I know it’s not easy. But you’ve got to do it,– for her sake, if not for your own.’
    Rosemary tried. But Eva was not a comfort. She was a responsibility, a worry, one that was no longer shared and enjoyed with the man she loved. How could Rosemary hope to give her a balanced and positive upbringing after this? How could she do it alone? The task, even with her parents to help her, seemed insurmountable, a mountain with only a goat-track to follow. And at the top? All she could see was a very long drop down to rock bottom.
    The berries had drained and now Rosemary prepared the Kilner jars; they must be sterilised with boiling water. She filled the kettle and switched it on. Pressed her weight against the counter.
    Eva was tearful and needy and this had stretched her jangled nerves to the absolute limit. Of course the child had lost her father.
Yes, Rosemary
, she told herself sternly,
she’s lost something too
. And at a vulnerable age when no one should have to experience such a loss, such a heart break, one she might never recover from, too.
And she needs you
. That was the thing, the certainty that hit her like an axe in the guts when she awoke from a fitful sleep every morning at dawn. She had to be two parents for Eva now. And the more her father reminded her of this fact, the more she cringed away from it. It was weak of her, she knew, but she simply couldn’t think where