Megan Hughes

Meet the story protagonist

Megan Hughes is thirty-eight years old. She has hazel eyes and mousey, shoulder-length hair – a woman who, in better times, carries herself with quiet confidence and a warmth that draws people to her. Those who know her well describe her as capable, funny in a dry sort of way, and fiercely devoted to her children. Those who don’t know her as well tend to underestimate her. That’s a mistake.

Megan Hughes in happier times

The novel opens on the morning of her husband Adam’s funeral, and the Megan we meet is not the Megan that her family and friends recognise. She is hollowed out by grief and anxiety, running on very little sleep and a great deal of willpower. But even in those first pages, the steel is visible. She gets her children ready, she manages the extended family, she holds herself together in public. She has done hard things before – her early life ensured that.

Megan’s childhood was not a happy one. She grew up in Bristol, the daughter of a violent man and a mother – Ruth – who was devout, repressed, and stubbornly self-denying, and who endured more than any woman should have to. Megan grew up knowing what it felt like to be frightened in her own home. She carried that knowledge into adulthood, and it shaped everything that followed: the kind of marriage she wanted, the kind of mother she would be, the kind of life she was determined to build. One that was safe. One that was hers.

After her father’s death, Megan and her mother had very little. Out of necessity, they moved to Cardiff and started again. Ruth made the best of it in the joyless, uncomplaining way that was her nature. Megan quietly made a different set of decisions. She was going to university. She was going to build a life she chose, not one that was handed to her.

She came to Bournemouth to study marketing, and the three years that followed opened the world up in ways that her teenage years had not prepared her for. She was resourceful, adaptable, curious – someone who had grown up quickly and was good at reading people and situations. But university taught her something beyond her degree subject. It taught her what she wanted from life, and who she wanted to be. She arrived a girl who had known hardship and fear. She left a young woman with a clear sense of her own direction.

It was in Bournemouth that she met Adam Hughes. They were escapees from a dull party one night – a sweaty student gathering that never really lived up to its promise. Sometime after midnight they ended up on West Cliff Beach, pulled off their clothes and ran naked into the freezing sea. Afterwards, damp, shivering, but elated, they hurried back to the house Adam shared with some mates. There they sat on his single bed in the half-light of a feeble lamp, fingers curled around mugs of hot coffee, smiling at each other in the quiet. Their first time together. Neither of them knew, that evening, quite how much would follow from it.

After graduating, Megan worked in marketing in the hospitality industry. They weren’t married when Molly was born – young, starting out, still figuring it out together. But there was no going back now, and by the time Ben arrived a few years later they had tied the knot. Adam’s business took off, and the family moved to a wonderful home in Bournemouth that felt like everything Megan had spent her childhood wishing for. Over the fifteen years of Molly’s life, Megan’s own career gradually wound down as she devoted herself to her children and to making their home the warm, well-run place it was. She had no regrets about that. Life had been kind.

But when Adam dies suddenly, the ground disappears from under her feet.

Molly is fifteen when the novel opens, artistic, quietly resilient, and prone to mood swings. Ben is eleven, about to start secondary school, and dealing with his father’s death by pretending he is fine. Megan knows them well, loves them fiercely, and is terrified of failing them.

Her best friend is Kas – Kashvi – warm, practical, funny, and exactly the kind of person you want beside you when your life falls apart. Kas has known Megan long enough to call her out when necessary, and to know when to simply be there instead. She is one of the few people in front of whom Megan allows herself to be frightened.

Megan’s relationship with her mother, Ruth, is more complicated. Ruth loves her daughter in the particular way of women who have never learned to show it easily — through practicality, through presence, through a form of stoicism that can look, from the outside, like a lack of warmth. The two women circle each other carefully, each carrying knowledge of what the other has survived. Ruth has lived in Cardiff since Megan was a teenager, and it is from there that she travels to be with her daughter in the days after Adam’s death.

Megan in The Café Toucan

There are two things Megan cannot stand. The first is being patronised – something she encounters rather more than she should, and responds to with a quiet precision that tends to leave the patroniser looking foolish. The second is spiders. Even a small one will stop her cold. She has never entirely explained this to herself, but it has been with her since childhood.

Megan likes an occasional glass of wine. She carries herself well and knows how to dress when the circumstances require it. She is a competent cook. She drives a VW Golf, her choice unconsciously mirroring some of her values. Practical, capable, but rarely out of place. She has, until very recently, had a life she was genuinely proud of.

But Megan has a secret. And now someone is blackmailing her.