28.

Terri Drummond had encountered a number of complicated individuals in her years as a counsellor, and the more complex the character, the more she relished the challenge. In the beginning, her approach to her profession hadn’t always sat well with many of her contemporaries. But her headstrong personality and steadfast belief in her own methods soon began to make an impact. She didn’t go by the book – instead she threw it out of the window and wrote her own. Several, in fact. She was an enigma, but she got results. She knew it, her supporters knew it and, much to her delight, so did most of her adversaries.

Her friendship with Charlie Graham spanned over three decades, ever since the days they had worked together in the Royal City Infirmary back in the sixties, she as a nurse and Charlie as a young doctor. An urge to travel spurred by the onset of The Troubles took her to India, then Europe, then America, and when the wanderlust finally wore off, she decided to settle in London. She would nurse if she had to, or wait tables, or pull pints in an Irish bar, but she fancied something different. Something challenging. Something people-focused. A chance encounter with a grief-stricken, suicidal middle-aged man named Derek Davidson, on a park bench on Hampstead Heath, led her to inadvertently save a life, and started a whole new wonderful chapter of her own.

But now, in her late fifties, Terri realised that the chapter had become an incredibly long one, and she was tired. It was time to wind down, start a new chapter, or even, possibly, a brand new book. Her health wasn’t what it used to be; a viral infection had left her with a weakened chest. The pace of London life was getting to her. And she was sad, still grieving the loss of her partner, Harry. Her doctor told her that she needed a change of air. Seeking a second opinion, she called Charlie. ‘Come home, Terri,’ he had said. So she did.

Terri’s intentions had been to read, try out some recipes from her collection of cookery books that she’d rarely had the time to open, or maybe even write a novel, as she’d certainly had plenty of inspiration over the years to draw from. She would take long walks on the beach, meet old friends for lunch, see more of her brother, Patrick, and her nephews and nieces. But retirement didn’t really suit Terri. She had kept herself busy for a while, transporting her old life from a rambling three-storey house in North London, to the small two-bedroom cottage at Cove Bay. But she quickly decided that she didn’t have the patience to sit around and read all day, and realised there was limited satisfaction in cooking exotic meals for one every night of the week. A frustrating dose of writer’s block was stalling her writing project, and there was only so much walking she could do in a day. She developed itchy feet, and twitching fingers. She missed her ‘people’, as she called them. Terri didn’t feel complete unless she had someone else’s life to sort out.

So, when Charlie Graham phoned her one especially dull day a couple of months after her return to Ballybrock, saying he wanted to have a chat about a particularly delicate patient of his whom he didn’t want to refer to the practice counsellor, Terri leapt at the chance to get going again. Of course, she didn’t let on to Charlie just how relieved she was. ‘All right, darling,’ she had told him. ‘Just for you. But just this once, mind. I’m a lady of leisure now, don’t forget. And there had better be a damn good lunch in it for me.’