Clancy paused. ‘Oh?’ She considered herself far too down-to-earth to believe in the supernatural but Dilys sounded so confident that she asked, ‘Where?’

Dilys put down her spoon in her empty bowl with a sigh of satisfaction. ‘In the garden. He lives next door.’ She burst out laughing.

Clancy laughed too, laying down her spoon, though she’d eaten only half her lunch. ‘I thought you meant he was a ghost!’

‘Not him.’ Dilys was still grinning. ‘We can’t share a house but we can’t do without each other completely.’

Finishing the industrial-strength tea and feeling ten times better for food inside her and the hand of friendship Dilys seemed to have no hesitation in extending, Clancy went out to empty her car boot ready for their shopping.

They set off for the supermarket, Dilys exclaiming over the comfort of the car’s leather interior. Clancy was instantly plunged into a host of memories of Will helping her choose the car less than a year ago. It had been a symbol of the success of IsVid and now she was glad she’d chosen to spend the money that way rather than doing something sensible like paying a chunk off the mortgage. Resolutely, she shoved the thought away. ‘I forgot to look how big the freezer at the Roundhouse is.’ She slowed the car as she turned right onto the A149 and immediately came up behind a car towing a caravan.

‘There’s a good, capacious freezer,’ pronounced Dilys. ‘Capacious was the answer to the nine-letter word puzzle in the paper yesterday.’

Clancy tried not to be distracted by the energetic pinging of the phone in her pocket now they’d left the village and, presumably, picked up a signal. ‘Are you a puzzler? I like Sudoku and crosswords.’ They passed the rest of the journey amicably chatting about why cryptic crosswords were so much more fun than the ‘easy’ counterparts, which neither of them actually found easy, until they reached Hunstanton, where, entranced by the dancing blue sea on their right, Clancy had to concentrate to follow Dilys’s directions past the formal gardens and through the busy traffic to the centre of town.

When she’d parked at Tesco’s, she stole a quick look at the alerts now showing on the screen of her phone: Tracey and Asila both asking if she was OK. After a moment’s deliberation, she tucked the phone away again because she didn’t know how to reply. Was she OK? She could’ve said, Fine except for my relationship ending and my co-directors wanting me out of the business, but as they were two of those directors it would be a) aggressive b) whiney c) pointless. It would be more fruitful to devote her time to providing herself with what she needed in order to be OK.

As well as filling a trolley with food and household items, she discovered that seaside supermarkets sold things like wetsuits for children, buckets and spades … and airbeds. Just in case Aaron truly intended leaving her without a bed for the night, she bought a lilac-coloured one for less than a tenner and Dilys offered to lend her a duvet. She hadn’t wanted to bring constant reminders of Will in the form of things they’d shared so new bedclothes would be on her shopping list once she had a permanent bed sorted.