On their next day off together, Adam took Jessica for a drive to Prestatyn. It was cold but the day looked gorgeous. The town held special memories for Jessica as it was there, while she had been out with Adam and his grandmother, where she had first begun to think she might be in love with him. The low sun shone across the beach onto the path they were walking along, the sky blazing blue overhead.

‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’ Adam said, pointing out at the horizon and pulling Jessica towards a bench with his other hand. She didn’t reply but rested her head on his shoulder as they sat together looking out across the sand. ‘Are you going to be okay?’ he asked.

‘It’s not very easy to forget everything I did.’

‘How’s Dave?’

‘He seems all right but things are different between us. Izzy thought we’d had a falling out because we didn’t take the piss out of each other for two days. I’m sure it’ll be fine but, for now, every time I see him I know he’s the person who helped make everything happen.’

‘What about Iz?’

Jessica laughed. ‘Still talking about being fat. I think she knows something isn’t quite right with Dave and me but she’s good at keeping things to herself.’

‘And Caroline?’

‘She’s doing okay. She moved into her new flat yesterday and says the divorce is going to go through smoothly. I don’t know how she got herself into that mess.’

‘You didn’t say she had moved out already.’

‘That’s because I like staying at yours.’

Adam laughed. ‘And how are you?’

Jessica reached an arm around Adam’s waist and pulled him tightly to her. ‘I’m not sure I’ll ever forgive myself for what I did to poor Annabel.’

Jessica gulped as Adam squeezed her a little too strongly, lifting her head from his shoulder and pulling him towards her, cradling his head. ‘Why did you forgive me for walking out on you?’ she asked.

Adam said nothing at first before gently responding, ‘Because you asked me to.’

Jessica said nothing but gazed towards the horizon. She didn’t really like the cold weather but sometimes the crisp days where the sun offered a wonderful bright light with no heat could be utterly enchanting.

She thought of being young, running through fields and getting muddy, wondering what it would be like if someone had separated her from her parents in the way Toby had been parted from his.

Jessica had felt close to tears every day since the night Annabel stepped out of her car and walked into the train station. A few years ago, she could have counted the number of times she had cried as an adult on one hand. She didn’t know whether it was her age but, just recently, she was finding it harder to control her emotions.

Jessica released Adam’s head, allowing him to sit up straight. As she started to stand, he motioned to move too but she pushed him down. Ever since he held her in the cafe and let her cry on his shoulder, she knew this moment would come. Jessica dropped to one knee, took Adam’s hand and asked if he would marry her.

Afterword

One of the things I get asked a lot is where my ideas come from. Sometimes it might be an article I have read in the news, often not a big story but a small, hidden-away item which sparks my imagination.

I have a fairly set way of working in that I write most of the book in short form, usually a mix of bullet points and key sentences. After that, I write everything out ‘properly’. I still go off at tangents and come up with what I think are better ideas along the way but I nearly always have that set framework to work with.

Think of the Children was a little different because I wrote the first chapter before I had anything else.

A few years ago I was driving home from work on a Saturday evening. It was early summer and still light, even though it was around 9p.m. A couple of miles away from where I live there is a roundabout which connects one dual carriageway to another. As you may expect, some drivers zip across at a speed that even Jessica might shy away from. Unfortunately, just after the roundabout is a turn which is easy enough to take if you are accelerating, but not so comfortable if you haven’t slowed down in the first place.

As I drove, a vehicle three cars ahead of me sped across the roundabout and tried to take the turn. Instead, it spun 180 degrees and flew off the road, across a lay-by, and down an embankment. The taxi which was overtaking it (yes, really) kept going, as did the two cars directly behind.

I pulled into the lay-by and could feel my heart beating. It’s one of those clichés that everything happens in slow motion but that’s what it felt like. I knew the bank dropped steeply, before opening out onto a tight row of trees, so anything could have happened if the vehicle had hit those.

As I got out of my car, the first thing I noticed was a woman in a black cocktail dress and short coat walking up the embankment with her heels in one hand and a mobile phone in the other. Miraculously, the car had spun so perfectly that it was resting parallel to the road in between two trees, having hit neither of them.

‘Are you okay?’ I asked in what was perhaps one of the most obviously stupid questions ever. Her car had just spun off the road at speed and slid down a grass bank. She was hardly going to be jumping around in delight.

Her eyes were blank and she was blinking really quickly, not entirely aware of what had happened. She told me she had been listening to ‘Robbie’ a bit too loudly and got carried away. I assumed she meant ‘Williams’, though never clarified it. Perhaps she was really into an audio book being read by Robbie Coltrane? I asked if she was cold (she wasn’t), then phoned the police while she waited. After I hung up, she turned to me and said she should call her husband.

I remember the conversation exactly:

Her (sounding shaky and slightly panicked): ‘Hi, it’s me. I’ve had an accident in the car . . .’

<Short pause while he replied>

Her: ‘No, the car’s fine . . .’

I was a little shaken myself, more by her than anything else, so it was only later that I realised her husband had asked about the car’s welfare before he had checked hers.

That scene and the way I still see it in slow motion has stayed with me ever since and one morning I woke up with a really clear vision of a car crash which Jessica and Dave witness. The driver’s identity was always unknown, although, in my first notes, the person in the boot was alive. Much of the rest of the story moved around in my head and through my notes but that first chapter is almost exactly as I wrote it.

This was an incident where nobody was hurt and no one else stopped. Instead, it was ten minutes of my life while I waited with a bare-footed stranger as the sun started to go down on a summer’s evening. But that’s where a lot of the purer scenes and ideas I have come from – a few seconds here and a few minutes there: people and life.

As for the book itself, there are a few people who have collectively helped get this into your hands. Firstly, Claire, who helped me with the initial drafts of the first Jessica book, Locked In, what seems like an age ago. Without her, that would have been a lot worse and the rest of the series would likely not exist. Secondly, Imogen who gave me a hand with the ebook exclusive As If By Magic (yes, that’s a cheap plug).

The team at Pan Macmillan have been terrific in welcoming me into their family – and not just as that annoying cousin who turns up on Christmas Day getting on everyone’s nerves. Thanks to Natasha, Jodie and Susan, plus Trisha in particular, for their help, guidance and good humour. I’ve spent years learning the hard way that sarcasm in emails rarely comes across but somehow none of them have taken anything I’ve written too literally. Well, yet.