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Finally, there are two lone drinkers, both battered old men, who greet me every morning at eleven when I open and help me close every night. The pub is basically their home.

I polish a glass, despite the fact that everyone around here drinks straight from the can. Lately, I do anything that distracts me from my phone.Reaching for my phone.

Stalking people on my phone.

Not that Dimitry is on social media. Bratva soldiers don’t tend to put their occupation up with a profile pic.

I told him in my letter that I was taking three months to think.

Three months of no contact.

Three months of living back at my parents’ isolated farm. Of being the daughter of Pete and Suze Chalmers, and the topic of every local conversation for weeks:“You remember Abby... Ran off overseas a few years back. Nearly sent poor Suze gray, not that she’d ever let on, of course. Didn’t work out, of course. They all come back, eventually...”

Nobody bothers to whisper. In a town as small as Leetham, there’s not much point.

I knew what I was in for. I grew up here, after all. The only surprising thing was how quickly their interest faded. Somehow I always assumed my return would be some kind of major scandal. But in the time since I left, there have been other scandals. Pregnancies, divorces, affairs, even a drug bust or two.

Here’s the thing about rural Australia: if you’re a local, you’re always a local. Doesn’t really matter where you go, what you do, or how much you screw up. Sooner or later, thescandal fades, and everyone just goes back to sayingHey, did you see the cattle prices? And how about that lightning last night?

Everyone except my parents, that is.

They haven’t even got around to looking me straight in the eye, let alone talking about the weather. They definitely haven’t asked where I’ve been for the past six years.

Part of me is glad I don’t have to lie.

And part of me hates the wary sidestepping we all have to do, the carefully chosen topics of conversation that can’t possibly veer into dangerous territory.

But I chose this. I wanted it. I needed to know if I had a real chance at a normal life, or if I was doomed to live forever in the shadows, sheltered among Dimitry’s world of bratva or on the run from my own mistakes.

Running from the South American drug cartel who want me alive, and an even more dangerous man who wants me dead.

I shudder, pushing the darkness away.

My three months of space from Dimitry is up in one day. And I still have no answers at all.

I’m starting to wonder if I was asking the right questions in the first place.

I’d managed to convince myself that I could return to some kind ofnormal life.

And ever since a series of really bad decisions took me into the shadows years ago, anormallifehas taken on an almost mystical significance. So much so that I forgot what it actually feels like to live it.

I forgot why I left Leetham in the first place.

The fact is that although I love Australia’s wide, wild open skies, the smell of home, and the comfort of familiarity, Leetham has never truly felt likemyplace.

I never really felt like myself here, and I still don’t.

Not like I did when I stood in front of my easel in Spain,covered in paint, creating my internal world in color and inhaling the sweet, exotic Spanish air.

Or how I felt waking up next to Dimitry.

Or laughing with Darya . . .

Pain hits me in a sudden, vicious rush.

Time away has made those memories vivid, whereas Leetham is just exactly as I always remembered it. Exactly as it was when I left, neither more nor less.

In the years since I left, I’d almost forgotten about the last argument I had with my parents, the catalyst that made me leave in the first place. They’d wanted me to study something practical. Teaching. Agricultural science. Business. Something a farm girl could use in a country town.