Cosy Nights & Snowball Fights (Little Duck Pond Cafe #36)

PROLOGUE

FEbrUARY

A movie was playing. Always the same one.

It was Christmas and the gifts were wrapped and under the tree, and she was rushing back from the train station, eager to surprise her fiancé by getting home early. She’d told him she was going Christmas shopping in London for the day, but at the last minute she’d changed her mind, not wanting to do battle with the crowds on Oxford Street.

Her fiancé had promised to have dinner ready for when she got back, so she was half-expecting him to be in the kitchen already, preparing the food, maybe putting a bottle of wine in the fridge to chill for later.

But the ground floor of the house, when she arrived, was in complete darkness. He’d been meeting a mate for a lunchtime pint. Maybe he’d stayed longer than he’d intended?

Then she saw the light was on upstairs.

Her immediate reaction was that maybe her fiancé was ill. Worried, she dropped her coat and bag on the kitchen table, ran up the stairs calling his name and pushed open the bedroom door.

That’s when the movie went a bit hazy.

It was almost as if her mind was protecting her... trying to shield her from the shock... the gut-wrenching pain... of walking into that room and having the scales fall from her eyes.

*****

A smell of burning snatched me from the nightmare. The milk for my hot chocolate had boiled over in the pan. That was the thing about the movie. It would start to play at odd times, starting up when I least expected it, the shocking images crowding in so insistently that I couldn’t stop them.

The movie was always the same. But it wasn’t on the TV screen.

It was a torment in my head.

I broke down then, the tears I’d been trying to hold back for my parents’ sake streaming down my face. Trembling, I threw the scorched pan into the sink.

And when Mum came rushing through and put her arms around me, I told her that I couldn’t stay. I needed to get away.

Because then maybe the movie in my head would stop...