Back to Square One

Bec Pearce is forty-nine, newly separated after twenty-two years of marriage, and absolutely fine. She has a rental flat in Freshwater with nothing on the walls, an events business hanging on by a thread, and a story everyone believes: Andrew left her.

He didn't. She asked him to go.

She hasn't told her daughter. She hasn't told the four women she has met for Friday drinks for ten years. The only one who knows is the new app on her phone, the friend that listens at one in the morning and never says “Oh, Bec.”

Then a wave knocks her flat at a dawn ocean swim, and the man who hauls her out of the rip is not remotely charmed. Sam Brennan uses few words and means all of them. He runs a boat yard, swims every single morning, and went to school with Andrew. He knows exactly whose idea the divorce was.

With a launch party that could save her business, a seventeen-year-old who tells her nothing, and a brave face that's slipping by the week, Bec is running out of room for the lie.

And somewhere in Sydney, someone is reading every word she types.