Stack of One

Skinner's mother Megan is hiding in plain sight. She has a job at the all-day breakfast café at the motorway services. The café is no-one's destination, just an en route stop-off for strangers on the journey to somewhere else, and nobody local would ever dream of going there. She lives in the twilight of the careful shroud of anonymity she has drawn around herself, prevented by her traumatic past from embracing the future, and desperately missing the son she left behind. Guy is hiding too. After eight years with a Commando unit in Afghanistan he has made a career U turn and lost himself in a job as a reporter on a weekly paper in a small northern backwater. But Guy finds that life in a small town can be very small-minded indeed, and that local loyalties firmly exclude newcomers who would expose people's carefully kept secrets. When Megan finds herself embroiled in the search for a little boy lost in a raging river, Guy's coverage of the incident makes her front page news.