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PROLOGUE

W hen Kevin Wallis was nineteen, he started working for Craig Henderson of Henderson’s Handymen. Six months into the job, he became briefly famous for discovering a dead body in my friend Ray Underwood’s house.

I didn’t know him well back then, but Kevin had always struck me as a steady, sturdy kind of lad. Unflappable. The sort who went to the gym every day after work, and was a regular fixture at the pub on a Friday and Saturday night.

The way I saw it, levering up the floorboards in a client’s house one day and finding a dead man had the potential to screw a young guy up, even one as placid as Kevin.

If the experience left a mark on his psyche, though, I couldn’t tell.

In fact, he seemed more than happy to be interviewed by the local papers when the first body was discovered—mummified and packed in cat litter in an XXL plastic storage tub—and then again when the second body turned up. He wasn’t involved in the discovery of that one, or of the third and final body, which Ray’s dad found in Ray’s back garden when they were digging the foundations for a new conservatory.

I was twenty-seven when it all happened, working at my parents’ coffee shop. Kevin came into The Chipped Cup every morning for a flat white and a couple of pastries to power him through to lunch, and for a while after the dead-body debacle, I kept a quiet eye on him.

Every morning, he said to me, “All right, Charlie?”

Every morning, I replied, “Yep. You?”

He’d smile and nod, and choose his pastries for the day.

He liked to mix it up. Most regular customers ordered the same thing, and rarely if ever deviated from their happy rut. Maybe they got a bit wild when the bunny-shaped Easter biscuits came in, or shelled out extra for an orange-frosted Halloween cupcake to go along with their pumpkin spice latte. In general, though, the people of Chipping Fairford were creatures of habit.

Not Kevin.

He’d stand there and stare at the pastry case for a weirdly long time, bent at the waist and resting his hands on his thick thighs to give it all a really good look, from top shelf to bottom.

I thought his concentration was adorable.

And that right there, thinking he was adorable? That was my warning sign.

If I’d been paying attention, I’d have realised what was happening, and could have nipped it in the bud. The only other man I’d ever found adorable was Jasper Connolly, and the problem with Jasper was, I’d gone from thinking he was adorable to loving him.

And then, like an idiot, I’d doubled down, and gone from loving him to falling in love with him.

Not that Jasper ever suspected, thank god.

The point was, there was clearly a pattern, and I’d missed it.

Interest in the mystery bodies faded when no more came to light after the third one.

There was a minor resurgence of gossip when someone in the local police let slip some details about the bodies being dressed in outfits that didn’t match their estimated age, which led to top local reporter Karen Strickland publishing an article calling them human dolls. Ray got in a tizzy about her calling his house a dollhouse, but otherwise, the whole business had fizzled out.

Four years later, no one even mentioned it.

Four years later, I turned thirty-one and Kevin was twenty-three. One morning I looked into his lovely brown eyes as I handed him his flat white, our fingers brushed, and I thought, Oh, hell .

I’m in love with Kevin Wallis.