The Secret Wife: A captivating story of romance, passion and mystery. Gill Paul

       Prologue

       Lake Akanabee, New York State, 19th July 2016

      It was twenty-nine hours since Kitty Fisher had left her husband and in that time she had travelled 3,713 miles. The in-flight magazine had said there were 3,461 miles between London and New York, and the hire car’s Sat Nav told her she had driven 252 miles since leaving the airport. A whole ocean and half a state lay between her and Tom. She should have been upset but instead she felt numb.

      Back in the UK it was four-thirty on a Sunday afternoon and she wondered what Tom was doing, then grimaced as she pictured him pottering around the house in his jogging bottoms and t-shirt. He would no doubt have called her closest friends, all innocence, asking if they knew where she was. How long would it take him to work out she had flown to America to look for the lakeside cabin she’d inherited from her great-grandfather?

      She had been careful not to leave any paperwork behind so he didn’t have the address. Let him stew for a while. It served him right for his infidelity. She shuddered at the word, an involuntary image of the messages on his phone flashing into her brain. She was still in shock. Nothing felt real. Don’t think about it; stop thinking.

      The woman on the Sat Nav was comfortingly sure of herself: ‘In two hundred yards take a left onto Big Brook Road.’ It felt nice to be told what to do; that’s what she needed when the rest of her life was falling apart. But a few minutes later the voice-lady seemed to get it wrong. ‘You have reached your destination’ she said, but all Kitty could see was dense forest lining the road on either side. She drove further but the voice urged her to ‘Turn around’.

      Kitty got out of the car to explore on foot and, peering through the trees, discovered a track overgrown with waist-high grass and hanging branches. She consulted the map that had been sent with the cabin’s ownership documents and decided this must be it. The car’s paintwork would get scratched if she tried to drive down so she set off on foot, pushing her way through the thicket. There was a droning of insects and a strong smell of greenness, like lawn cuttings after rain. Before long she could see the steely glint of Lake Akanabee, with pinpricks of light dancing on the surface. When she reached the shore she looked around, squinting at her map. The cabin should have been right there.

      And then she noticed a mound about twelve feet tall, camouflaged by creeping plants. It was thirty years since anyone had lived there and Kitty was