‘You don’t understand. If I don’t make it home it will look as if I’m –’ how would it look? It wasn’t as if any of her family knew the real reason she didn’t want to be there. No one did. Not even Rosie. It was her secret, which in itself wasn’t too much of a problem because she generally kept her feelings to herself. Growing up, Rosie had expressed enough feelings for both of them and Becky let her get on with it.

And now she thought about it she realised that the weather and the train strike gave her a perfect excuse not to show up for Christmas at all. For a wild moment she pictured herself sprinting from the airport and heading back home for a quiet Christmas of video games and walks in one of London’s snowy parks.

But then the image faded and she thought instead of her mother’s roast turkey and the tiny cinnamon flecked cookies she baked simply because she knew they were Becky’s favourite. She thought of the cheerful red stocking her mother would have hung on the fireplace even though Becky had insisted they were all too old for a stocking (she wasn’t too old for a stocking, but she was old enough to understand how much work went into filling it and felt a responsibility to demur). She thought about her father insisting ‘just one more game of Scrabble, Becky’ and the warm, comforting weight of their ancient Irish setter Percy as he lay on her feet.

She felt homesick for Northumberland with its windswept empty beaches and imposing castles.

She was scared to go home and yet she longed to go home.

‘Could you look again? One more time? I really need to get home,’ she said. ‘It’s not just about Christmas. My brother is having a special party – he’s making an announcement. I assume that means he’s getting engaged –’ she frowned, ‘and I’m not sure how I feel about that. He only met her two months ago. That’s fast don’t you think?’ But she wasn’t a great judge of what was normal when it came to relationships. She wasn’t the sort who fell in and out of love easily.

The woman in the queue adjacent to her nodded. ‘It is fast. My sister was married after four months and she was divorced a year later. She discovered all these things about him that she wished she’d known before.’