‘Oh.’ He averts his gaze and takes a small sip of his tea. ‘Fay said you’re a travel writer.’

‘That’s right.’ I smile with relief. This territory I can talk about for hours. ‘My mum works on a cruise liner so I grew up seeing the world in my school holidays.’

‘Bet that was an interesting childhood.’

‘It was. I lived with my dad during the term, but we visited Mum pretty regularly.’ He nods, listening. He doesn’t ask any more questions, so I carry on pitching myself to him. ‘I used to write about the places that I saw, then I built my own website and eventually started to pester magazine and newspaper editors for work. I can pretty much get work writing about anywhere, these days.’

‘That would’ve been Nicki’s dream job,’ Charlie says with a fond smile. Nicki, not Nicole, I note. ‘Before she got a book deal,’ he adds.

And before her life was cruelly stolen from her.

He breaks the long, awkward silence. ‘So you liked her novel?’

‘I loved it!’

He smiles properly now, a smile full of pride, but its light reaches his eyes only briefly.

How bad do I feel? He shouldn’t have had to prompt me – I should’ve been raving about his lovely wife’s book from the moment I got here.

‘I really loved it.’ I’m trying to make up for my gaffe, and for the next few minutes it’s all I can talk about.

In Nicole’s novel, the heroine, Kit, is a travel writer who falls in love with two men at the same time: Morris, a laidback surfer-turned-entrepreneur from right here in Cornwall, and Timo, a sexy Finnish rock climber who is based in Thailand. At the end of the first book, Kit goes to Thailand to break up with Timo because Morris – her first love – has proposed to her. But, before she can come clean, Timo asks her to marry him, too. And she says yes.

I know! WTF, right?

‘I detest cheating with a passion, so I shouldn’t have liked this book on principle,’ I tell Charlie, arguably too honestly. ‘But somehow Nicole made it… I don’t know. It’s so believable. She wrote in such a heart-wrenching way that I couldn’t help but be swept up in the story. I felt like I was inside Kit’s mind, feeling every emotion she was feeling and somehow understanding the crazy decisions she was making. It was…’ I shake my head, finally, yes, finally lost for words.

I think I’ve said all the right things from the look on his face.

‘Do you know what was going to happen in the sequel?’ I ask. ‘Do you know who Kit was going to end up with?’

He shakes his head. ‘I’m not sure even Nicki knew.’