they won’t guess if they’re not told,’ Treena pointed out.
This was true, since I was medium-sized and had the black wavy hair and pale olive complexion of my Italian father, while Mum had been a tall, Titian-haired beauty. We did share a heart-shaped face with a broad brow from which sprang two wings of curling hair, and eyes of an unusual light grey-blue ringed with black, but that was it.
‘Well, I expect I’ll have to go there with work at some point. I’ll tell you what it’s like, and then if there aren’t any Vanes running around with axes, we could go and visit it,’ she suggested.
The promise Mum had extracted from me did seem a bit silly now and these future plans comforted me. I told myself that I had lots to look forward to. I had good friends, loved my job and, if the family were moving abroad, at least that gave us somewhere nice to go for holidays. And Mike had his own work, as well as a passion for early morning running that took him for miles and seemed to be almost an addiction.
There were bound to be minor misunderstandings at the start of our married life, when Mike and I had known one another for so short a time, but since we loved each other, I was quite convinced any little difficulties would soon be ironed out.
Only I didn’t realize that it was me who was supposed to be ironed out, and then refolded into a state of submission, fear and obedience … I wasn’t going down without a fight, however.
Sarcasm had always been my weapon of choice. The first time Mike gave me a list of things he wanted me to do while he was at work one Saturday, I looked at him in astonishment and said, in a robotic voice, ‘This android is not programmed to take your orders.’
He didn’t find that funny, and was grouchy for the rest of the weekend. Then he apologized but I knew he was still punishing me when I began to be excluded from social arrangements or he totally overrode household decisions we’d already agreed upon. I began to see a pattern, and again, he wasn’t amused when eventually I said that if he’d wanted a Stepford Wife he should have married one. I really wanted our life together to be everything it had once promised to be but I knew I had to choose between saving the so-called marriage or saving myself in the end. Before he destroyed my love for him, I wasted too much time trying to make things right between us, but when I finally took my courage in my hands and told him I thought we’d been mistaken in each other and should separate, he flew into one of his terrifying cold rages, which by then had much the same effect on me that the Dementors had on the characters in the Harry Potter novels, and threatened that if I ran off to Treena for help, he’d blacken her professional reputation.
That stopped me in my tracks. She’d moved to Merchester by then and taken out a loan to buy into her friend’s family veterinary practice, not to mention a mortgage on a small terraced cottage. I couldn’t risk any action that might harm her.
Mike had already made very sure he’d alienated me from any other friends I might have turned to, and the family were too far away to see what was happening. I had casual friendships with my gardening colleagues but, due to Mike, I no longer even went to the pub with them after work … and his habit of suddenly turning up at the garden where I was working didn’t endear me to my employers, either.
He’d known Treena was the one person I could turn to and so once that was impossible, I felt trapped and hopeless.
Now, of course, I find it hard to understand how I came to be so much under his thrall, but one thing followed another in a spiral of descent, until I began to feel I was losing both the fight and my mind, and there was no way out but one – until Fate and Treena intervened to set me free and I became the Runaway Bride.
Now, five years later, here was Treena telling me that Mike had remarried and moved on.
I realized I was still holding the phone in one hand and Treena’s voice could be heard faintly asking me if I