Jordy nodded, wiping his tears roughly on his sleeve. ‘’Bout time you offered.’

When the beers were drunk, Jordy left by the seldom-used front door so Lee and Daisy wouldn’t see his red eyes. Aaron sat on alone for a while, his own words echoing in his head. If you love someone then you’re mad to let her leave you if she loves you back. If. If …

After a while, he got Nelson and the lead. Daisy instantly jumped off her chair. ‘Are you taking Nelson for a walk, Uncle Aaron? Can I come?’

Aaron smiled at the little girl. ‘Not this time, sweetheart. Sorry. I have to have a talk with Granny on my own.’

‘Awwwwww, pleeeeeeeease,’ Daisy wheedled, her face slackening with grief that her favourite – and only – uncle wasn’t going to be wound around her little finger on this occasion.

Lee came to Aaron’s rescue. ‘I think we should offer to take Nelson for a walk and leave Uncle Aaron and Granny to talk.’ He glanced at Aaron. ‘Is that OK?’

Daisy was instantly distracted. ‘Oh-kay!’

Aaron felt a flood of warmth. ‘I’d appreciate it.’ He was acutely aware that Lee had barely mentioned Alice leaving her husband and the village, or whether Lee knew where she was. But what happened next was Lee’s decision, not Aaron’s. Aaron had been overprotective-slash-interfering for too long. It wasn’t until others began to interfere in his life that he realised how frustrating and undermining it could be.

A few minutes later, Aaron was facing his parents across their kitchen table. It took resolve, because he knew there was no way he was going to be able to say what he had to without causing them dismay, but he began by explaining how Clancy had begun to feel unwelcome in the village. ‘She told me something important – that home isn’t always a place,’ he went on. ‘Harry’s going to make his home with Rory and that’s all he needs, even if it means leaving everything he knows in Nelson’s Bar when both he and Rory have lived all their lives in this village, like me. So I’ve come to explain to you that, although I have no idea what the future will look like, I want to be with Clancy. Nelson’s Bar has always been important to me but now … I might leave the village.’ He patted his mum’s hand, because he knew she’d take it hardest.

‘Where will you go?’ Yvonne looked stunned.

‘Good question.’ He raked his fingers through his hair. ‘If she decides she has to be in London, maybe I can make roof gardens for people there.’ Aaron shoved away an image of himself working with the fumes rising all around him from the nose-to-tail London traffic.

‘But you’ll be like Crocodile Dundee trying to live in New York!’ Yvonne protested.

Aaron gave a wry smile at his mother’s words because Crocodile Dundee had been a favourite film when Lee and Aaron had been little, but it was an uncomfortably evocative analogy. ‘When two people from different backgrounds want to get together, someone has to change. It might have to be me, that’s all. It would get us out from under Genevieve’s eye. I’m not OK with what she’s been doing.’ He gave an outline of what that seemed to be.