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      For Glenn, Emma, and healthcare in all its many forms

      Table of Contents

       Cover

Praise for Abigail Gordon

       Excerpt

Dear Reader

       About the Author

       Title Page

      Dedication

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

       CHAPTER THREE

       CHAPTER FOUR

       CHAPTER FIVE

       CHAPTER SIX

       CHAPTER SEVEN

       CHAPTER EIGHT

       CHAPTER NINE

       EPILOGUE

       Copyright

CHAPTER ONE

      THE TAXI THAT had brought her from the airport had gone, and surrounded by the baggage that contained her belongings Emma took a deep breath and looked around her.

      When she’d been driven through the town centre it had been as if nothing had changed while she’d been gone for what seemed like a lifetime. The green hills of Gloucestershire still surrounded the place where she’d been born and had never imagined leaving. Everywhere the elegant Regency properties that Glenminster was renowned for still stood in gracious splendour to delight the eye, while, busy as always, the promenades and restaurants had shown that they still attracted the shoppers and the gourmets to the extent that they always had.

      All that she had to do now was turn the key in the lock, open the door and step inside the property that had been her home for as long as she could remember, and of which she was now the sole owner. The act of doing so was not going to be easy. It felt like only yesterday that she had fled in the night, heartbroken and bewildered from what she’d been told, as if the years she’d spent in a land far away had never happened.

      During all that time there had been no communication between herself and the man she’d always thought was her father, and now he was gone. Since receiving the news that he had died, all the hurts of long ago had come back. What he had done to her had been cruel. He’d taken away her identity; made her feel like a nobody. Turned the life she’d been living happily enough for twenty-plus years into nothingness.

      He had been a moderate parent, never very affectionate, and she’d sometimes wondered why. He’d provided the answer to that by telling her on the night she’d left Glenminster in a state of total hurt and disbelief that he wasn’t her father, that he’d married her mother to give her the respectability of having a husband and a father for her child when it was born as the result of an affair that was over.

      Emma had directed the taxi driver to take her to lawyers in the town centre where the keys for the house had been held in waiting for when she made an appearance. Once she had received them she had been asked to call the following day to discuss the details of Jeremy Chalmers’s will.

      She’d been informed previously that he’d left her the house, or she wouldn’t have intended going straight there on her return. She was uncertain if she would be able to live in it for any length of time after her father had disowned her that night long ago in such a cruel manner, but it would be somewhere to stay in the beginning while she slotted herself back into life in Glenminster.

      Back in the taxi once more, having been given the house keys, she’d given the driver the directions for the last lap of her journey back to her roots and had thought grimly that it was some homecoming.

      Gazing down at the keys, the memory was starkly clear of how she’d packed her cases and

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