'Really? What would you call it? Because I'd call it pathetic, I think.'

'I really don't think you're in any position to preach to me about right and wrong, Amelia.'

'Someone has to. Might as well be me.'

'Well, not you. Not today. Not now. Okay? Don't you dare judge me. You've got no idea what my life has been like. What it's like now he is back in it.'

'I can't believe you're saying that to me. No idea? I've known you for thirty years, Suze. Thirty years. I've watched you make mistakes big ones Rob, Sean, Douglas. And I've never interfered, have I? But you've got to stop painting yourself as some kind of victim. You're a volunteer. You're making victims of everyone else.'

'Who? Who am I making a victim of?'

'Douglas, for a start.'

'You don't even like Douglas.'

'What's that got to do with it? Doesn't matter if I like him or not. I don't think anyone deserves to be cheated on, Susannah. Not just Douglas. Rob's wife.'

'I'm not cheating.'

Susannah's voice had risen higher now, and other patients on the ward were starting to listen. A nurse had stopped a few feet away, pretending to check something, but riveted by the quarrel.

Amelia's voice was lower, a hiss. 'Don't fool yourself, Suze. You will. You will. Don't expect me to condone what you're doing. Don't expect me to wait around to pick up the pieces when it all falls apart.'

Susannah stood up, her knees shaking. 'I can't stay here and listen to this any more.'

Amelia sat back in her chair, a stubborn expression settling on her features. 'So, go.'

Bluff called, Susannah wavered. This was a chemotherapy ward. Poison was coursing this very moment from a drip in her best, oldest friend's arm into her veins, beginning its sickening, destructive journey around her body. She'd promised she'd be here.

'Go. I don't want you here. I don't want to look at you right now. I don't even know you.'

Amelia left her no choice.

She turned and walked away before she started to cry.

Before she was out of earshot, she heard Amelia's voice. 'Your life has been what you've let it be, Susannah.'

April She couldn't eat and she couldn't sleep. She couldn't concentrate. She could barely talk. She needed to be somewhere else. Her anxiety focused on a triptych now, not just two men. She'd never fought like this with Amelia. She hated it.

When she ran away, Susannah left both of the men in her life a note. Douglas's was written on a sheet of paper she pulled from the printer at the computer in the dining room.

I've gone away by myself for a few days. Sorry to be dramatic, but I need to think, and I can't do that while I'm here with you. Please leave me alone while I do this.

Susannah Rob's was a text to his phone.

Dear Rob I don't think I can do this. I'm so confused. Everything is wrong. I need to clear my head. I'll call you when I get back. Susie It took Susannah a moment to realize where she was when she woke up to bright sunshine. London had been grey and chilly classic spring weather but it was instantly different here. It had been very late, and pitch black outside, when she'd arrived last night. The easyJet plane had been late no surprise and it had taken a frustratingly long time to pick up the hire car she'd pre-booked online at a surprisingly crowded Toulouse Airport. She wasn't the only escaping English person in town, it seemed. Mum's idiosyncratic directions (heavy on local landmarks, but light on road numbers, and almost totally devoid of left and right, this not being Mum's strong suit) from the airport to the house had required all her concentration easier said than done while driving on the opposite side of the road in a left-hand-drive car on unfamiliar French roads in the dark. She'd been too tired when she arrived to do anything except drink a large glass of water, pull off her jeans, and fall into bed.

It was such a relief, this morning, to be here. Alone. And far away. She'd never actually been here before, though she'd sat through a thousand photographs of her parents here. But all around her were familiar objects Mum and Dad had furnished the barn with pieces from the family home, and she recognized pictures and photographs, as well as the big bed she had just slept in, from her childhood home. The walls were painted her mum's favourite shade of yellow finally at home here in the sunny South of France. Anxious to be outside, she put on her jeans still crumpled on the floor from last night and pushed her feet into a pair of wellington boots she saw near the door, grabbing a fleece from a hook, and went to explore. Mum and Dad's home was a small barn conversion on an old farm in a tiny hamlet a few miles outside the town of Samatan. Nearby were a renovated farmhouse and a little cottage also owned, she knew from Mum, by English people. There hadn't been any lights on when she'd arrived last night, and she rather hoped they were unoccupied right now she wanted total seclusion, not neighbours, however friendly they might be. The barn had perhaps an acre of ground a gravel area immediately adjacent to the house, and then a gently sloping lawn with some shrubbery and a few established trees. An old wooden fence separated the property from fields that ran as far as the eye could see. She knew from Mum that they were sunflower fields and that in a couple of months they'd be a mass of the tall, iconic yellow flowers. In the far distance, all along the horizon line, she could see the snow-capped Pyrenees. And beyond that, a cloudless, cobalt-blue sky.

She had no idea what time it was, but the sun was already warm. She took the fleece off and tied it around her waist, then walked down as far as the fence, revelling in the silence. She could almost feel her thoughts slowing down, untangling themselves, with each fall of her foot on the grass.

Things had become so messy. Douglas and the kids, and Rob.

And Amelia.

The fight with her best friend disturbed her more than she might have expected. It was like everything Meels had said had held up a mirror to her very soul she was right. With Amelia she couldn't hide and she couldn't lie. Amelia had a treatment today. It would be the first one she wasn't around for, and she felt lousy to be missing it. Amelia had made it pretty clear, the last time they'd seen each other, that she wasn't flavour of the month, but Susannah knew she'd still expect her to show up as usual. She hadn't even been brave enough to call Amelia and let her know she wouldn't be there. She'd texted Jonathan.

Running away. Expect you know why. Such a bloody mess. Sorry. Will you tell Amelia? And go with her to Tuesday's appointment?

He'd replied almost straight away.

She told me. Don't worry she'll calm down. I'll go with her. Breathe, Susannah. Relax. It'll be okay. We love you. J Susannah wished she was as sure as he was that everything would work out. She and Amelia had disagreed before. Loads of times. Theirs was not a relationship based on seeing everything exactly the same way. She wouldn't have wanted a best friend like that. They'd fallen out before, too. About small things like cleaning out the refrigerator, when they lived together. And big things like Alastair, all those years ago, and about Amelia leaving Jonathan.

This felt worse than all of those times. She was afraid there might not be a way back to the way they had always been.

Right now, though, Amelia was just one of the things in her life that she felt frightened about and uncertain of. Everything was shifting. This was too hard.

She'd called home the day before she'd come out here. She didn't even really know why, but she suspected that she wanted to hear the voice of unconditional love. She wouldn't tell them what was going on she couldn't. But she'd hear their voices. Dad had answered. Mum was out, he said, at St Gabriel's. It was Saturday, and there was a wedding later that day. Normally he asked her how she was, and then passed the phone straight to Susannah's mother. This time, hearing his familiar, calm voice, she started to cry softly into the receiver.

'What's wrong sweetheart?' Her dad sounded alarmed.

She sighed. 'Everything.'

'Ah ...'

She'd run away from home one summer afternoon, when she was about twelve, over some long-forgotten and probably imagined injustice. She'd taken her bike, flouncing out of the kitchen door dramatically with some spare clothes stuffed in her green Army Surplus shoulder bag, throwing a mouthful of vitriol back at her mum. Dad had just been pulling into the driveway after work, but she'd ignored him pointedly, and pedalled off furiously. Just round the corner, she never knew how or why, she came off the bike spectacularly, flying over the handlebars and landing on the road a few feet in front. She'd cut her head, an angry inch-long gash just above the right eyebrow, and grazed her elbows and knees. One knee was particularly bad black grit from the road was embedded in the streaks of blood, and it stung badly. She'd been stunned, embarrassed and hurt, and she'd sat where she landed, too shaky to stand up, crying hot angry tears, and letting the blood run unchecked in rivulets down her arms and legs. She tasted it, too, trickling down her cheek into the corner of her mouth from the cut on her face.

Dad had come round the corner five minutes later, before anyone else saw her. He was still wearing his suit, but he'd picked her up and moved her to the side of the road. She'd bled on his white shirt and blue tie, where he held her. They sat there for a while, on the pavement, with her snivelling and relating her tale of woe, while he dabbed at her wounds with his red spotted handkerchief. All she'd wanted, she remembered, was to be listened to, to be understood. Right then, and even sometimes now, it had seemed as if Mum didn't listen often, or well. And didn't understand, when she did listen. That afternoon, it felt like Dad did.

After a few minutes, he helped her back to the house, and she sat on the low brick wall outside the back door while he went in and spoke to her mum. Mum had come out then, with her striped apron still tied around her, and taken her inside. She never knew what he'd said to her, but she wasn't told off that day.

And now it had been his idea that she should go to the house in France. There was no one there, he said. Within ten minutes he'd found a flight on the internet.

'Perfect place for thinking, if that's what you need to do, darling. Always clears my head.'

She wondered what he needed to clear his head of.

He took control, once she'd agreed, just as he'd done when she was a child. She remembered that problem solving had always been his thing. Two hours after she made the phone call, they met at a service station and drank a cup of coffee together at a melamine table.

'Does Mum know?'

He nodded.

She felt so pathetic.

He put his hand on hers. 'We're both worried about you, love. You don't have to tell me, Susannah. I think I might already know. So far as I'm aware, no one gets this emotional over work, so it doesn't take a genius to guess it's trouble at home.'

She looked down at her hands.

'And I hate to see you so unhappy. After you called me, while I was driving here, I was trying to remember the last time I saw you really happy. Saw you with the sparkle in your eye that you always had when you were a little girl. It frightened me when I couldn't remember. That's a rotten realization for a parent to come to. Makes you feel guilty, because you haven't seen it before, and makes you feel unutterably sad, because it's all you really want for your kids to be happy.'

'I'm sorry, Dad.'

'That's a ridiculous thing to say, silly girl don't do that.' He squeezed her fingers tightly. 'You mustn't be sorry. You must be happy. That's what matters. Go to the house. Stay. Stay as long as you want. Figure out what it's going to take to make you happy. Then come home and do it.'

'You make it sound so simple.'

'And it can be. You young people always make it so damn complicated.'

'What if making yourself happy makes other people unhappy, Dad?'

He stared out at the car park for a moment, as though he was thinking. When he looked back at her, he smiled gently. 'What if not being happy yourself makes it impossible to make anyone else happy?'

'That isn't an answer.'

'I haven't got all the answers, sweetheart just the keys.' He pulled a red key fob out of his jacket pocket and laid it on the table beside their hands.

Susannah looked at the dry skin, the age spots across his knuckles.

'I'm just a parent. Life isn't black and white, Susannah. It's grey a million shades of grey. But it seems to me that if you're going to get anywhere, you have to answer my question to you first, before any of the others.'

She leant down and kissed the top of his hand.

For the first day or two, she just slept. She couldn't believe how tired she was. The moment she relaxed, and forced herself to release the tension she'd been carrying in her neck and her shoulders, the exhaustion set in. She woke up late, walked in the garden, drank tea on the terrace, and then just went back to bed. The sun was setting before she woke up again. She didn't know it was possible to sleep for so long.

On the second morning, fighting the urge to curl up again after she woke up at eleven, she made herself shower and dress, throwing back the sheets on her bed, and opening the windows wide to air the room. She wanted to do something. She opened the neat blue binder Mum kept on top of the refrigerator, full of information for guests about shops, restaurants and things to do locally, and read about the nearest town, deciding that, after lunch, she'd go.

It was evidently market day in the town of Samatan. It took her ages to find a place to park. People were milling around, chatting and shopping. The whole square was taken up with market stalls. She used her schoolgirl French and an eager smile to buy some fruit and vegetables at one stall, and then some extraordinarily pungent cheese and plump dark olives at another. It wasn't fair that people said the French were unfriendly and uncooperative, she decided. That was Paris, maybe. Here, they listened to her strangle their beautiful language and did their best to give her what she thought she'd asked for. Her parents used the big Leclerc supermarket nearby to stock up, and there was enough in the store cupboards to keep her going this was just playing at shopping, and it was fun, she realized. The anonymity was comforting. She felt like Juliette Binoche if Juliette Binoche couldn't really speak French. She wandered around, wondering if she blended in. The large corrugated-iron warehouse at one end of the car park was full of livestock. There were sheep and cows and pigs and chickens. Children played with them, poking their fingers through the cages and chattering happily. The noise and the smell were almost overwhelming. One man in a peaked cap had some small rabbits she really hoped weren't supposed to be eaten, and another had a litter of chocolate-brown Labrador pups. She stood and watched them wrestle and roll. He passed her one, when he saw her looking at them, and she held the tiny creature for a few minutes. He nuzzled into her hand, and curled along the crook of her arm. The farmer said something to her that she didn't understand, so she handed the puppy back, smiling apologetically and bowing, for some reason.

It was late afternoon as Susannah pulled into the driveway, and the sun shone, low and strong, in her eyes as she made the right turn off the road and swung her car into the gravel driveway. She shoved her foot down hard on the brake when she realized there was another car where hers had been parked earlier a red Fiat with English plates. Someone must have come to open up one of the other two properties. Susannah felt a flicker of resentment she wished they hadn't come, and she wondered why the hell they'd had to park outside the barn. It must be someone who wasn't familiar with the place.

She climbed out, and took her string shopping bags out of the boot of the car, trying not to mind. It had been a good afternoon. She'd forgotten everything for just a while.

And then she saw him.

He'd walked down to the fence where she'd stood on her first morning here. His hands were in his pockets as he watched her and he looked, for a moment, like a nervous little boy. He was lit from behind and so she couldn't see his face, but she recognized instantly the shape and the demeanour of the man with whom she was, once more, crazily, amazingly in love.

She took the first few steps in his direction in slow motion, held back by a hundred questions. But then she dropped the bags she was holding, and ran at full pelt towards him, her heart racing. He took his hands out of his pockets and held his arms out to catch her as she launched herself headlong at him. They stood, for the longest time, still in each other's arms in the late afternoon sunshine, holding tight.

She'd never been so aware of the physicality of another human being in her life. Every one of her senses was full of him how he felt in her arms, how he smelt.

He put his forehead against hers, and for a heart-stopping moment, their eyes inches apart, they felt their breath mingle, their noses fitting together. The first touch of his mouth on hers was so gentle it almost tickled her lips. The tiny kisses he planted grew firmer and stronger, and then they were finally kissing hard, breathless and full of longing.

First kisses. He'd been the first boy to kiss her. All those years ago. And now this was another first kiss, every bit as extraordinary, twice as meaningful. She kissed him back with all that she was.

Eventually, she pulled back to look at his face. He hadn't shaved, and for the first time she saw that his beard was flecked with grey. He looked exhausted.

'How?' She couldn't believe that he was here.

Rob shrugged. 'Your dad. I practically begged him to tell me where you were. I promised him I wouldn't upset you he wouldn't tell me until I promised him that. I said I just had to find out that you were okay. I know you asked me to leave you alone, Susie, but I couldn't.

'Then I just drove. I took a ferry last night, and then I just drove straight through.'

More than once, he'd asked himself what the hell he was doing. He'd never in his life felt so conflicted. Never liked himself less, never felt so alive. He wondered what he would do if Helena wasn't far away. He hadn't had to tell lies to do this. They'd spoken on the phone the day before. It would be a few days before they would again. He hadn't had to explain an absence or make up a story. Her absence gave him freedom. Would he have told lies? Would he have invented fishing buddies or some conference?

He was afraid that at this moment there wasn't a thing he wouldn't do to be with Susannah. And it was the power of his feelings that terrified him.

More than once, on the drive to Dover, once his car was locked into the lines for the ferry, when he wound down the window and told the customs guy what the purpose of his trip was, and when he stood on the deck of the ferry among the school kids, the chilly wind making his ears ache, he wondered what the devil he was playing at.

He wasn't the type. To lie and cheat. He'd grown up with two parents who'd loved each other long and well. He'd loved with an open heart. He'd waited, waited a long time, to meet and marry Helena. He'd never even come close before. He'd married her believing she was right for him, and he for her, and that they'd be happy together, for ever, like Frank and Lois. He'd meant every word he'd ever said to her, and he was horrified by the idea that might change.

He hadn't spent every day of the last however many years dreaming of Susannah, any more than she had of him. He wasn't sure how to explain it, even to himself, and he knew he wouldn't be able to articulate it. But he couldn't resist it, God help him.

He didn't even know what he expected to happen when he got there. He hadn't rehearsed any scene in his mind. No speech. No gesture. He just knew that when he saw her, running towards him across the grass, a girl again, her face incredulously happy to see him, the sunlight turning everything around her into an orange aura, he felt a surge of joy that nothing in his life up until that point had ever produced, and in the moment when he felt it, he couldn't apologize for it.

'You're crazy.'

'No. I was crazy. I was crazy worried about you. I was crazy frustrated that I couldn't see you. I would have stopped at a hotel or somewhere if I thought I'd have been able to sleep, but I wouldn't have.

'But I'm not crazy now. I think I may be saner this minute than I've been in a long, long time, Susie.' He pulled her back into his embrace. 'And thirstier. And smellier, I expect. And hungrier ... pretty hungry right about now.'

They both laughed.

'You didn't eat, you idiot?'

'I ate a fairly unpleasant burger, on the ferry,' he looked at his watch, 'about twenty-four hours ago, it feels like ...'

She slapped his chest. 'You need to eat ...'

He caught her arms on him, and pulled her hands up to his face. 'I need you.'

She looked at his lovely face. 'I can't believe you did this. I can't believe you came all this way. No one ever did anything like that for me before.'

His eyes bored into her. 'No one ever loved you the way I love you, Susie.'

In that moment, she knew he was right. Not Sean. Nor Douglas, who apparently had made little effort to find out where she was, and hadn't come after her. Who was happy to give her all the space she wanted.

It was Rob.

He was the one.

Rob took a hot shower while she cooked something for them both. She loved him being here. She could hear the water running, and loud splashes as water ran off him. She lit the fire she'd laid earlier that day, and the dry wood crackled and sparked in the grate. She found a few white candles in a drawer in the kitchen and she lit the table with them, laying two places side by side, although she didn't feel remotely hungry she was full. Full of him. It occurred to her, as she uncorked a bottle of red and checked on the pasta dish she'd made, that they'd never had this never been in this simple domestic setting together. This was a first.

When he appeared, his hair was wet, still dripping on to the shoulders of his check shirt. 'God, that feels better.'

She passed him a glass of wine.