Bring Me Back: The addictive new page turner from the bestselling author of Behind Closed Doors

n but Finn and I had reached an impasse

But I feel stuck in an impasse,

Time is an oddity when it comes to memories;

going to have to spend the rest of my life in subterfuge,

To meet someone so unorganised, so unaffected by modern life and the London rush was like a hit of alcohol. If it had been anybody else, I would have walked away quickly before they could ask me how to find a number for a hostel. But I was already realising that I couldn’t walk away from you.

Layla had carried this one around with her for fear that Ellen would take it and claim it as hers. She called it her talisman, and in times of stress she would hold it between her thumb and index finger and gently rub the smooth surface.

as my fingers close around its smooth, varnished body I feel the same uncomfortable tug I always do, a mixture of longing and regret, of desolation and infinite sadness. And gratitude, because without this little wooden doll, I might have been tried for Layla’s murder.

I want to go to my office – a bespoke outhouse in the garden – and make sure that my Russian doll, the one Ellen doesn’t know about, is there, in its hiding place.

too full of kinetic energy to sit.

It was Layla who first told me the story, of how she and Ellen both had a set of Russian dolls, the sort that stack one inside the other and how one day the smallest one from Ellen’s set had gone missing. Ellen had accused Layla of taking it but Layla denied that she had, and it had never been found. Now, thirteen years after I first heard that story, the irony strikes me because, like Ellen’s little Russian doll, Layla went missing and has never been found.