Love Always: A sweeping summer read full of dark family secrets from the Sunday Times bestselling author

Love Always: A sweeping summer read full of dark family secrets from the Sunday Times bestselling author
Harriet Evans

A compelling and heartbreaking tale of lost love, family secrets and those little moments that can change your life for ever.Returning to the wild Cornish coast for the funeral of her beloved grandmother, Natasha has no idea of how things are about to change. This trip reunites her with her large and complicated family for perhaps the last time: Summercove, her grandparents' beautiful house by the sea, is being sold. With it go a generation of memories and the key to the death, many years ago, of fifteen-year-old Cecily, her aunt, a tragedy that no one ever discusses.When she finds the opening pages of Cecily's diary, written the summer she died, Natasha discovers the family she idealised has secrets that have long been buried.But where is the rest of the diary?Back in London, trying to rebuild her own life, Natasha is haunted by Cecily's writing and the tragic tale of love, rivalry and heartbreak promised in those scant pages. She has to know what happened, the summer her aunt died. And so she makes some life-changing decisions – and in the process finds out that a second chance at love might be possible…

HARRIET EVANS

Love Always

Copyright

HarperFiction

HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)

Copyright © Harriet Evans 2011

Harriet Evans asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Extract from Rebecca reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown Group Ltd, London on behalf of the Estate of Daphne du Maurier

Copyright © Daphne du Maurier 1938

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Source ISBN: 9780007350223

Ebook Edition © 2011 ISBN: 9780007350247

Version 2015-09-08

For Chris I.W.O.

We can never go back, that much is certain.The past is still too close to us. The things we have tried to forget and put behind us would stir again, and that sense of fear, of furtive unrest, struggling at length to blind unreasoning panic – now mercifully stilled, thank God – might in some manner unforeseen become a living companion, as it had been before.

Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier

One crowded hour of glorious life

Is worth an age without a name.

Thomas Osbert Mordaunt, quoted by Mr Justice Marshall in his summing-up at the Stephen Ward trial, 30 July 1963

Contents

Cover (#u05c5b12d-9d4e-54a9-a998-1fdf22298e02)

Title Page (#u0dfc022b-49b7-5aa3-994c-88e5a8f4e23c)

Copyright

Epigraph (#u386434d0-c4d7-558f-aa58-d4c6fc1d7b4a)

Prologue

Part One: February 2009

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Part Two: July 1963

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen