Chapter One

I pulled the car in close to the hedgerow and turned the key, and that amazing silence came down. It was the silence I had been wanting for more than a year, since my husband had left me, since I'd decided my only hope of peace lay in the ancient rhythms of an English village.

I used to wake in our apartment on West Eighty-third and listen for that silence through Manhattan's background hum. Keeping by long habit to my side of the bed, I would see behind closed eyelids the narrow country road and the old cottages with roses in bloom on their walls, as they had been when Quin and I had first come to Far Wychwood.

The village inn had been more affordable than an Oxford hotel when we'd come over to attend the wedding of our daughter, Emily, in Christ Church Cathedral, and we'd loved it so much, we had stayed there again when our grandson was born. The memory had become a refuge after Quin told me he'd fallen in love with another woman, and then through the hard labor of adjusting to life alone.

I closed my eyes and sank into the silence. When I opened them I saw my new home, standing where it had stood since the seventeenth century. Built of honey-colored Cotswold stone, its slate roof thick with velvety lichen, its windows mullioned and diamond-paned, a trail of brown vine by the door with the ghosts of last summer's roses clinging -- it looked like a Travel Britain poster, and it even had a name, in the English way: "Rowan Cottage."

I had been right to give the realtor an order for "a nice little furnished place in Far Wychwood" and leave the rest to her. She knew the kind of thing we Yanks were looking for.

I stepped out of the little car I had rented that afternoon at Heathrow, on a surge of relief at having made it all the way to Gloucestershire on the wrong side of the road without killing myself or anyone else. It would have been more sensible to have spent the night in London, as Emily had urged me to, but I couldn't wait to see my new home.

I pulled my suitcase and carry-on from the trunk. I had given everything to my friends in New York except a modicum of clothing, and the books, CDs, and photo albums I'd shipped. The rest belonged to the three quarters of my life Quin had shared, and I never wanted to see it again. I looked forward to leisurely days browsing county markets and antique shops for the furnishings of my new, solitary life.