Free In Too Deep by Samantha Hayes

the ducks following on, convinced we have food for them. The sun sweeps low through the willow fronds that are already coming into leaf, but there’s a nip in the air now evening approaches. The last couple of days have been unseasonably mild, but it’s set to change. I pull my jacket around me.
    ‘Imagine living here,’ Hannah says wistfully. ‘You’d feel like a strawberry cream, wouldn’t you?’
    I’m not sure what she means, but smile anyway. Her imagination has always taken her places, though less so in recent years. Perhaps that’s to do with the losses she’s suffered, and suddenly I feel so selfish, so wretched andwrapped up in my own grief that I’ve failed to pay attention to what my daughter must be going through.
    ‘Chocolate box cottages,’ she says as if I’m stupid, turning round, trailing her gaze up and down the street. There’s no one about, not even a car passing through, and we only saw one other person on our walk down here before dinner. She gives a little laugh.
    ‘Apparently the pub further down has a restaurant attached that’s owned by a celebrity chef,’ I say. ‘Though I can’t remember who.’
    I did a quick search of the area before we came, keen to find activities to fill the gaps between the treatments Rick had booked – mainly so I didn’t have too much thinking time.
Dangerous
time, I once said to Paula as she listened to me talk for an hour solid. She understood what I meant.
    ‘I wouldn’t want to live here, though,’ Hannah continues. ‘It’s far too quiet.’
    ‘I would,’ I reply, surprising myself.
    At that moment, I realise there’s nothing I want to do more than pack a small suitcase and leave our house behind, contents and all. If I can’t have it with Rick in it, I don’t want it at all. So much has happened since we moved there, good and heart-wrenchingly terrible, but with Rick beside me we somehow made it through from one day to the next. We were a team, working through things together, as if one of us somehow managed to balance out the other’s grief, knowing instinctively when to be strong.
    ‘That’s natural,’ I say. ‘You’re young and still need the buzz of a city and friends close by. When you get to my age, you’ll be after different things. Just you wait until babies come along.’ I wink, thinking she’ll shove me in the ribs, or make a growling noise that says she’s not even thinking about such things yet, but she doesn’t. She just keeps on staring up the street.
    ‘Let’s save some bread from breakfast and bring it for the ducks,’ I say, but still Hannah doesn’t look round.
    I pat Cooper and press my face against his neck, breathing in his pleasant scent, knowing that all I’m trying to do is catch a whiff of Rick.

Gina
    The first time I saw Paula Nicholls, I instantly liked her. She made me feel as if I wasn’t coming apart at the seams quite as much as I believed. She was worth the money for that alone – an hour of feeling as near to normal as I was probably ever going to get.
    But my concern was, as I walked into her office for the first time a couple of months ago, that she wouldn’t like me. I’d lost my husband, after all. Been very careless. The family liaison officer allocated by PC Lane was the one to recommend counselling support and while she couldn’t refer me to a specific therapist, she said there were one or two close to where I lived who had done work with victims of crime before.
    Was I a victim of crime? I wondered as I waited, slightly early, for my appointment. If so, I had no idea what the crime was. Or perhaps it was a crime-in-waiting, an impending, looming event – a crime that may never actually happen, but would instead shroud my life with foreboding and dread, driving me mad from fear andanticipation, forcing me to live the rest of my days constantly cowering.
    Rick had been missing only two weeks when I picked up the phone to make an appointment with Paula, but I didn’t get to see