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      CHAPTER ONE

      SHE was late. She always seemed to be running late these days, Georgia reflected tiredly, as she checked the traffic and then hurried across the road.

      The problem was that she hadn’t been able to park her car close enough to the agency who supplied her with the computer programming work she did at home, which meant she had had to walk right across town—not a very long way, but it all added extra time to her schedule, time she could barely afford to lose, time when she wasn’t earning money, when she wasn’t—

      She checked herself with a small grim exclamation. She had a very strict rule which meant that, once she was out of the house and on her way to visit Aunt May, she did not allow her growing anxiety over money to show in any way which might alert her aunt to what was happening and so destroy the concentration that she so desperately needed if she was to get well.

      If she was... There was no if about it, Georgia told herself fiercely. Aunt May was going to get better. Hadn’t they said at the hospice only last week how well she was doing, what a wonderful patient she was?

      Georgia stopped walking, her expression of stern concentration softening as she thought about her aunt. Her great-aunt, really: an indomitable lady of seventy-odd, who had stepped in and filled the gaping chasm left in her life when her parents were so tragically killed in a plane crash, who had filled her life and her world so completely and so lovingly, who had helped her to overcome the trauma of losing her parents, and who had brought her up so wisely and so caringly that she considered herself to be far better loved, far better understood, than many of her contemporaries. And even when the time had come for her to spread her wings, to leave school, and her home, to go on to university and from there to London and her first job, her aunt had encouraged her every step of the way.

      Keen, ambitious, intelligent and adaptable: those had been only some of the compliments and praise Georgia had received as she climbed the corporate ladder, determinedly reaching towards the goals she had set herself. A real high-flyer was how others described her, and she had been proud of that title, single-mindedly telling herself that there would be time—once she was established in her career, once she had achieved all that she wanted to achieve, seen and done all she wanted to see and do—to take life at an easier pace, to think about a serious relationship with someone and perhaps about children of her own.

      Of course she had still kept in touch with her aunt, spent Christmases with her, and some of her other holidays, encouraged her to come up to London for brief stays in the tiny flat she had bought in one of the prestigious dockland developments, unfortunately just when their price was at its highest...

      Yes, she had seen her path so clearly ahead of her, with no obstacles in her way, nothing to impede her progress, and then the blow had fallen.

      Having an unexpected few days extra leave with nothing planned, she had gone north to the Manchester suburb where she had grown up, and discovered the shocking truth of her aunt’s illness. A ‘growth’. A ‘tumour’. So many, many different polite ways of describing the indescribable, but no real escape, no nice polite way of covering up what was actually happening.

      She had taken extra leave, ignoring her aunt’s insistent command that she return to London and her own life. With her aunt she had seen doctors, specialists, made hospital visits, and then, once all the facts were known, she had gone back to London—but not for long. Just for long enough to hand in her resignation and to put the flat up for sale—which went through, but at a price which had left her with no financial margin at all.

      Then had come the move out here to one of her aunt’s favourite small Cheshire towns, and the purchase of the cottage, with what had been a horrendously large mortgage even before the recent interest rate increases. The work she received from the agency, no matter how many hours she worked, could never ever bring in anything like the salary her skills had commanded in London. And now added to those other burdens was the cost of ensuring that her aunt could continue to receive treatment at the very special hospice, only a handful of miles away from the cottage.

      Today, as she did every day and every evening, Georgia was on her way to see her aunt, to spend time with her, achingly conscious of how frail she was, frantically sick inside with anxiety for her, desperately praying that she would keep on fighting...that she would get better...

      It was only with the discovery of her aunt’s illness that Georgia had realised that without her she would be completely alone in the world. That knowledge had bred inside her an anguish, a fear, which she was totally at a loss to control. It was, moreover, an emotion which was totally out of place in an adult woman of close to thirty. Of course she loved Aunt May, of course she desperately wanted her to get better—but to experience this despairing, consuming sense of desertion and fear... What she was going through now was worse, far worse, than the emotions she had experienced when she’d lost her parents. She was, she sometimes thought, getting dangerously close to going completely out of control, to giving in utterly and wholly to the maelstrom of emotions threatening her.

      And yet, until now, she had prided herself on being a sensible, mature woman, a woman not given to the wilder impulses of emotionalism. Yet here she was, virtually trying to make a bargain with the gods, feverishly begging for her aunt’s recovery. And still, on some days, her very bad days, it seemed to her that, no matter how hard she willed it to be different, her aunt was slowly slipping away from her...