‘Of course not, and it is a wonderful thing. I’m so overjoyed that Connie’s daughter can meet her father. It’s the next best thing to Lara being reunited with Connie. And here in the very place where Connie was actually happy,’ Grace said, shaking her head in bewilderment as she went over everything he had told her: how Connie’s parents had lied in telling her Jimmy had been killed in the war, presumably to put pressure on her to give Lara up for adoption. But Jimmy hadn’t died; he was missing for a while, presumed dead, until he made it back home having survived in a POW camp. He was in very bad health on his return and spent the last part of the war in a sanatorium, believing Connie had forgotten all about him as she hadn’t replied to any of the letters he had sent when he’d first enlisted. And this broke Grace’s heart all over again, to know that Connie’s parents must have deliberately withheld Jimmy’s letters from Connie. Then, when Jimmy saw Connie in the crowd on VE Day, saw how radiant and clearly blissfully happy in love she was with the GI, with a diamond ring on her finger, he knew that he had to let her go. But, even though he later went on to marry her best friend, Kitty, after her Stanley didn’t make it back home from the war, Jimmy never let Connie go from his heart completely.

‘And I still can’t believe Maggie kept all this from me,’ Grace sighed, incredulous. ‘I only spoke to her yesterday and she never said a word … Did Larry and Betty know too that Maggie had managed to find out all this about Jimmy?’

‘Yes, but only for a short while, I promise. It all happened so quickly, Grace, and we all wanted to surprise you … to do something really special for you, and well … you do agree that this is much more meaningful than me just phoning you from New York to say that I had found Lara, and then Maggie calling in to Cohen’s to tell you that she had discovered Jimmy was still alive?’

‘Hmm, I suppose so,’ she teased, ‘but I can see that I’m going to have to keep a close eye on you from now on, because we have spoken on the phone at least a trillion times in the last few weeks and I never once suspected you were planning such a momentous surprise as this.’

‘And it killed me, it really did, Grace, but I promise it was done with the best intentions.’

They reached the path that led down to where Lara and her daughters were now embracing Jimmy and all his family. Grace stopped walking.

‘Do you mind if we join them later … there’s something I want to do first.’