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Holly’s mother took a deep breath in as she reached for her wineglass, though this time she was far more measured with the sip she took. Still. A pause stretched between them. Holly had asked for it all. She wanted to know every part of how her mother and Giles bumping together in a random supermarket would end up with Holly renting a house that he owned.

It took her mother a moment or two longer to figure out where to begin.

‘I was buying a chicken,’ she started. ‘Or it could have been a beef joint. No, it was a chicken, I think. For our Sunday roast. You know how we like our chickens for our Sunday roast?’

‘I don’t need to know about the contents of your shopping basket, Mum,’ Holly said, a little sharper than she expected to. ‘I just want to know about Giles. What did you and Giles talk about?’

Her mother nodded again.

‘Well, he was the one who spotted me. He came up and said hello. Asked me If I remembered him, which I did of course, from when he helped us with the car.’

Holly nodded along as she pictured the scene in her mind. The way Giles would approach her mother, probably with his hand outstretched. All manners and charm. And she knew exactly what incident with the car Wendy was talking about. Giles had had to pull the pair of them out of a ditch just outside Northleach once, when a pheasant had startled them on the road.

‘And then what?’ Holly pressed.

‘Well, then he asked after Arthur, how he was doing with his heart, and so I told him. And then he asked about you. About you and Hope.’

Holly’s throat was tightening for reasons she couldn’t explain. Perhaps it was all the memories with Giles. The way he had intertwined himself so deeply, not only with her life, but with her parents’ too, since she moved back here. She’d never realised it before.

Her mother paused, staring at her glass, though she left it where it was.

Holly prompted her to carry on. ‘What did you tell him about me?’

‘Darling, you’re saying it as if I did something unsavoury. But it wasn’t like that. He asked me how you were doing and I said you were doing well. I said that you and Ben were doing a great job of parenting Hope, considering you weren’t together any more.’

Holly bit down on her tongue. She wasn’t sure why it mattered that Wendy had mentioned Ben and their situation, but it seemed yet another invasion of their privacy. But then they had obviously spoken about more than that, as Holly had ended up living in Giles’s house.

‘What then? What did you talk about after that?’

Her mother let out a long sigh, then continued. ‘We probably talked about a few other things. I can’t remember what exactly,but Giles asked about your living situation and if you were still with Jamie. And I said yes, it seemed to work okay. But I mentioned I was a bit worried about Jamie and Fin getting married. Then… then…’ Her words stuttered and stumbled and Holly could tell this was where they got to the crux of the story. The part she had been waiting for her mother to tell her since they sat down.

‘What did you say, Mum?’

With a deep breath in, Wendy visibly steeled herself before she spoke.

‘I said that you were struggling, that a bit of room and privacy would be good for you and Hope. But I said that there wasn’t much available to rent, at least not within your price range. That’s all. It was true. I wasn’t saying anything bad, Holly. I wasn’t saying you needed him.’

‘So what, then he just swept in and gave you the keys to the cottage?’

She bit down on her lip. ‘Not exactly. He told me he might be able to help, and asked for my phone number, in case he heard of anything.’

Of course, Holly had known it hadn’t been a single encounter at the supermarket that would have resulted in her having the cottage, but she didn’t know if she wanted to find out just how far this web of lies went.

‘So you spoke to him again?’

Wendy exhaled loudly, as if it was physically paining her to have to recount it all.

‘We had conversations, just brief ones,’ she continued. ‘He rang me a week or so later. Said there was a property in the village that he was thinking of getting as a buy-to-let. He’d had his eye on it for months, he told me, but it was only a small place, and he wanted to know whether I thought it would work for you and Hope before he bought it.’

Holly only then realised how tightly clenched her muscles were. With deep breathing, she forced them to loosen.

‘So you mean he bought me the cottage? He bought the cottage for me and Hope to live in?’

‘I don’t think it was like that, darling. I really think he wanted some property to invest in.’

It was a sign of her mother’s naivety and lack of knowledge about Giles that made her think that. Deep down, Holly knew that was exactly what Giles had done. He had bought the house for her. Still, she drew in a lungful of air and forced herself to steady her thoughts. She hadn’t come here to get mad at her mother. She’d come to make things clear, to put things right, so she didn’t harbour this anger within her. But it wasn’t all that easy.

‘So, how often have you spoken to him? Do you still speak to him?’