‘I know. It’s no age, is it? He was away at a convention at the time. He’d been complaining about chest pains to one of his colleagues and they both assumed he’d pulled a muscle putting up the stand. At his age, you wouldn’t imagine it to be something more serious. After lunch, he said he didn’t feel right. Twenty minutes later, he collapsed.’ She took a deep shaky breath. ‘By the time the ambulance arrived, it was too late. Gone.’

‘But he was fit. Healthy.’

‘They had to do a post-mortem with it being a sudden death and they found a congenital heart defect that had gone undetected. He’d been a ticking time bomb and he hadn’t known it.’

I shook my head, waiting for some sort of punchline to a sick joke. But there wasn’t one. This wasn’t a joke.

‘When?’ I whispered.

‘Friday 15th July.’

Oh my God! That was the date he stood me up in La Vecchia Scuola. The staffroom started to spin and I thought for a moment that I was either going to faint or throw up. Fiona pushed a glass of water to my lips, ordering me to sip it. Gradually everything returned to focus.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t have just blurted that out. I know he was meant to meet you that night because he was finally going to leave me.’

‘No. He couldn’t do it. He didn’t turn up. He chose you.’ I grabbed a tissue from the box and wiped my cheeks. ‘He sent me a text that night to say…’ I stopped and stared at Fiona, open-mouthed. ‘You said he collapsed after lunch. That text came through around 11.00 p.m. That would mean… Was that you? Did you send the text from his phone?’

She lowered her eyes, colour flooding her pale cheeks. ‘I’m sorry. I was angry and I know I had no right to be after what I’d done but I couldn’t help it. I had to lash out and that was the only way I knew how.’