" 'Wake up, my love, it's morning.' ...Now I have placed the sound ...Rain sputtering in the gutter. His lips brush my forehead. I catch the fresh morning scent of him, that hint of lemon which enticed me right from the start." A heart-warming story of enduring love, and a portrait of life at a particular historic moment seen through the eyes of one close-knit community in the East of England. It is 1920. In the market town of Widdock, Rose Pritchard has her husband Leonard back from World War 1, physically in one piece but haunted by nightmares. She cares for him and for her brother Jack while still running the two bookshops that she and Leonard own, but pressures build, not least when Leonard meets the cultured and charming Italian wife of a diplomat . This is a beautiful historical novel with many resonances in the uneasy world of the 2020s . Can be read as a standalone novel or as the sequel to The Testing of Rose Alleyn, also published by 186 Publishing (ISBN 978-1-7397814-0-8)