Silently, I nodded. Feelings flooded me: loss and longing and…yes, anger, and while it would probably be better if I didn’t see Luke, I knew I still wanted to.

Why had Joey called? Because Luke had asked him?

But that wasn’t very likely.

Unless…it was?

Should I go to the funeral? Or stay away? Back in the day I’d been very fond of Mrs Costello but we hadn’t kept in touch.

I waited to see if the friendly voice in my head had anything useful to offer. But all there was, was silence.

Really? I asked. Seriously?

Still nothing. So I was on my own with this. Maybe I should pretend that there’d been no phone call? Just push it down and get on with my life until Monday, maybe Tuesday, whenever Luke had left the country again and gone home.

But what if I regretted it? Missed the chance of seeing him? Or felt guilty about not paying my respects to a decent woman who’d been good to me?

I hadn’t felt this unravelled in—God, I literally couldn’t remember when. The right thing was to ring Nola, my sponsor and the Wisest Woman I Knew, clean and serene for almost twenty-seven years.

‘What’s up, pet?’

‘Luke.’

‘What about him? No, don’t tell me, come straight over. Drive safely!’

Half an hour later, I was pulling up outside Nola’s beautiful red-brick house.

Unbelievably, it was twenty years since I had been a patient at the Cloisters and she’d come in to tell her story of recovery from addiction. With her beautiful highlights, zippy little sports car and impressive job, I thought she must be an actress in the pay of the treatment centre.

However, when I left rehab, I discovered she really was an addict. But she was drug-free, happy, hilarious and robust enough to weather all emotional storms. I wanted to be exactly like her so she took me under her wing and helped me to grow up.

My time in the Cloisters had revealed that I was an addict, but Nola had convinced me that, without taking anything mood-altering, I could live a normal life, a better-than-normal life. That I could cope with unpleasant emotions, that I could aspire to a healthy relationship with a man, that I could aim for whatever job I wanted—a life I was sure could never happen to a person as worthless as me.

I parked my car, hurried up Nola’s black-and-white chessboard path and Harry, her delicious husband, opened their smartly painted front door and welcomed me inside.

In my early days in recovery I’d a right crush on Harry, he was just lovely—always keeping a respectful distance but never less than kind. I yearned for a man as good as him.