15 Quotes by Elizabeth Haynes

She can’t quite bring herself to say more than that. And even when Jim had been alive and well, despite being happy and settled and everything else that came with a twenty-year marriage, it had been Aiden she’d thought about before falling asleep, Aiden she’d fantasised about when the mood took her.

I raised my wine glass to him and sipped a toast to the future, to what lay ahead.

That before-and-after-feel, as though this was going to be the end of one time and the beginning of another.

You head back outside, leaving the door unlocked. Better get used to it, you tell yourself. One of the dogs barks as you walk across the yard towards the main house. It’s an excellent warning, of course. You knock on the front door. ‘You don’t need to knock,’ she says, opening the door. ‘You can come straight in.

There were times Flora wanted to slap her mother, hard. She went to make toast for everyone, not least to soak up the brandy. The plainclothes police officer who’d been assigned to them was leaning against the breakfast bar, fiddling with her mobile phone. “Would you like me to do that?” she asked, when Flora came in.

The strangest thing was that I felt it, I felt everything. Normally I feel nothing but itching, discomfort, tightness, soreness. The surface of my skin is dulled by scars, lots of it is numb – nerve damage, apparently. When he touched me, I felt everything. It was like having new skin.