Amanda Brooke - The Widows’ Club

Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London, SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published by HarperCollins Publishers 2019

Copyright © Amanda Valentine 2019

Cover design © HarperCollins Publishers 2019

Cover photographs © Rekha Garton / Trevillion Images (main image); Ilina Simeonova / Trevillion Images (flowers)

Amanda Valentine asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of 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.

Source ISBN: 9780008219215

Ebook Edition © November 2019 ISBN: 9780008219222

Version: 2019-09-24

For my daughter and my best friend, Jess

Hope is the thing with feathers

That perches in the soul

And sings the tune without the words

And never stops at all.

Emily Dickinson

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Eight Months Later

Acknowledgements

Keep Reading …

About the Author

Also by Amanda Brooke

About the Publisher

STATEMENT

The Widows’ Club@thewidowsclub

In response to unprecedented media interest, we confirm that the deceased was a member of the group but are unable to comment further. We kindly request that the privacy of the group and its members is respected at this difficult time.

As April Thorpe stood outside Hale Village Hall on a damp September evening, she didn’t know if she was ready to join the group she spied through the windows. A dozen or so chairs had been arranged in a circle, but so far no one had taken their seats in the glass-fronted room on the lower floor. They had gathered in the foyer, sipping tea and chatting, and when someone tipped their head back and laughed, it felt wrong. How could they look so relaxed and happy? Who in their right mind would want to be a member of this exclusive club? April certainly didn’t.

She was tempted to scurry away home and scream into her pillow, but she knew from experience that wouldn’t lessen the pain. It was time for a new approach, but April’s feet refused to move. She was scared, and her fear was echoed high above her head in the low rumble of a plane making an approach to land. Hale was directly beneath the flight path for John Lennon Airport and in the darkened sky, the noise carried a sense of foreboding.

‘I don’t belong here,’ she mumbled to herself. ‘I’m too young to be a widow.’

A passer-by might say the same. Widows weren’t thirty years old with bright auburn hair and a feathering of wrinkles around sharp, green eyes. They were older, with laughter lines and watery eyes that captured decades of memories. Such women might point out that a lifetime wasn’t nearly long enough, but it was longer than the five years she and Jason had been married.

Widowhood had been thrust upon April seven months and twelve days ago on a cold, February morning, and whether she liked it or not, she had earned her place here. She imagined Jason prodding her shoulder to get her moving, and her body swayed ever so slightly.

‘Are you coming in?’ someone behind her asked.

April turned to find a smartly dressed woman offering her a smile. She looked like someone April might bump into at the office, someone normal, but her tote bag gave her away. It had the phrase, ‘Hope is the thing with wings’ emblazoned across it.

‘Erm. Sure,’ she replied.

Swept along by embarrassment rather than purpose, April stepped into the foyer to be greeted by the one person who wasn’t a stranger. Tara was in her mid-thirties and reminded April of a tall Audrey Hepburn with her dark hair pulled back into a chignon. The look was completed with a black-and-white striped top and a pair of pedal pushers. She didn’t look like a widow either.

Tara had stumbled into April’s life by chance a couple of weeks earlier when delivering boxes of exquisite cupcakes to the office where April worked as an internal auditor. The cakes were the finishing touch to a lunch-time baby shower the team had organised for one of their colleagues. Sara had had a difficult pregnancy, not least because her boyfriend had dumped her soon after she discovered she was expecting, but on her last day at work, her belly had been taut, her smile broad, and her happiness suffocating. April had no right to spoil her friend’s moment and in her haste to escape, she had almost knocked the cake boxes out of Tara’s arms.

‘Bad day at the office?’ Tara had asked later when she found April shivering outside the building.

April pulled out her earphones. She had been listening to one of Jason’s playlists on Spotify, feeling safe with songs her husband had chosen rather than risk new releases he would never get to hear. ‘I’m sorry about before.’

‘I don’t suppose I can expect everyone to fight over my cakes. I’m Tara, by the way.’

‘April,’ she replied as she took a closer look at her new companion. That day, Tara was wearing a vintage print tea dress with a pale yellow, round-necked cardigan. Her dark eyeliner flicks accentuated eyes that scrutinised April’s features.

‘I don’t normally do the deliveries,’ Tara said, ‘but I had to be on this side of the water anyway. I’m on my way to Clatterbridge Hospital next. I go back every year.’ She left a pause before adding, ‘My husband died there eight years ago today.’

‘That’s lovely,’ April said. She blinked. ‘Sorry, I mean, that’s awful, but it’s nice that you go back.’ Her cheeks flushed. She was usually on the receiving end of such a clumsy response and it felt odd to have the situation reversed. She hadn’t been prepared to meet another widow so much like herself. ‘You must have been quite young when you lost him.’

‘Twenty-eight.’

‘I was twenty-nine,’ replied April.