RATING: GOOD
SPOILERS!!!
Like other novels I have read this month, I did not like the last part of this book as much as the first chunk.
Ellie discovers Anca in her shed. She is in labour, and Ellie helps her into the house where she and Luca help her deliver the baby. She has a baby boy, but she refuses to touch or feed him. So Ellie takes care of him.
The following day Ellie and Luca have a tiff when she makes a comment, and he leaves. Alone with Anca, Ellie thinks about Adam and the day she followed him. Thinking that he might probably meet the woman at the café regularly, she chances to go there. The woman is there, and to her shock she realizes that it is Henrietta, Adam’s mum and David’s allegedly dead wife. Henrietta is reluctant to talk to her at first, but then she explains that she had to fake her death because that was the only way David would let her leave. David turns out to be a wife beater, and Henrietta suffered his ministrations for years. Ellie discovers that Henrietta and William didn’t have an affair, but he was trying to help her escape. That was why he withdrew the money and had a bag with her clothes in the cottage. It was Henrietta who posted the money to Ellie.
Adam arrives to see his mother, and Ellie talks to him. Kate had already told her that she suspected that Adam was the one who played the tricks at the tea room as he came to see her when she was alone there. Adam admits to having done all that and even killing Ellie’s hen as a way to warn her off. He was afraid for her because he knew what his father was like, and he thought that if she left the village, she would be safe, but it didn’t work out.
Back in the cottage, Ellie discovers that Anca is gone, so she decides to investigate and go to David’s place. I feel that this part of the novel is quite far-fetched. Ellie manages to sneak into the property, and she hides and sees Constanta, who she believed was Adam’s girlfriend, but she turns out to be working in the fields. She is actually Anca’s sister, and thanks to Constanta, she gets into the camp where the workers live and she discovers them too many people living in the same caravan. They explain that David enslaves them, working long hours and getting almost no money.
The following morning Ellie manages to escape thanks to Constanta. She gets a call from Luca, telling him that Anca is safe and he has called the police. In the cottage she finds Anca, and they finally talk. Anca tells her that the baby is David’s and he forced her to sleep with him because he threatened to sell her sister as a prostitute. Ellie tells her to have some rest. While Anca and the baby sleep, David appear, and even though Ellie tries to act nonchalant, the masks have to drop when he hears the baby cry. Ellie tells him what she knows, and David threatens her. He knows that William had something that could incriminate him, and he wants her to search for it and not leave any stone unturned. When they are in William’s study, Anca appears and she repeatedly hits him with a bat, leaving him unconscious. Ellie ties him up, and she knows that she has to call the police, but her fear is that the local officer is in cahoots with David. As she considers this, she notices the smoke in David’s property. Ellie runs there and sees Luca, trying to save people. She is scared for him, and in the end he is hurt and taken to the hospital.
The ending is quite happy. David and his children are arrested, and thanks to Henrietta’s and Anca’s testimonies, Ellie can report David for killing William. Apparently, the night he died, William went to the hall, and David forced him to drink and then put him in the car, telling him that Ellie had suffered an accident. That is why he was driving so fast that night.
Six months later Ellie visits Anca and her sister Constanta. Anca tells her that her baby is with foster parents as she thinks she will never be the mother he needs. She feels unable to look at the baby without remembered all she went through with David, and she believes that the baby will have good parents. As for Ellie, she is putting the cottage and the tea room on the market, and she and Luca are leaving. They don’t know where they will go, but they want a fresh start.
I enjoyed most of the novel. It is the last part that I found a bit implausible.
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