Blinking, she knelt at the grave and fussed about, putting the sunflowers into the holder there. ‘So many visitors today, my love,’ she said. ‘What a nice surprise! We’re all thinking of you, you’ll always be in our hearts.’ Okay, and now the devastated tears were kicking in. Now she had shifted into the gear of full-blown grief and was losing him all over again. She was remembering how they’d been watching television together, she and Roy, when the knock on the front door came. A normal evening, Roy with his bottle of stout, her with a white-wine spritzer, watching her favourite soap, Ebberston Terrace, and then some programme about the restoration of a stately home, both of them yawning a bit and thinking they’d have to turn in for the night soon. The cat purring on her knee.

Oh, but she’d give anything to go back to that moment, to freeze-frame it right there, staying in that safe little bubble of time forever! When the world was still good, when everything was steady and ordinary!

But then there had been a police car pulling up outside, and two officers walking up her front path, caps in hand. ‘Mrs Brearley? There’s been an accident,’ one of them had said, hardly able to look her in the eye. It was Richard Abrahams, her friend Valerie’s son, who was usually the most amiable of young men, always ready with a smile and a hello if she saw him in town. Not that night, though.

Out poured her sorrow now as she spoke to her son, lovingly, tenderly. All the things she’d ever wanted to tell him: hopes, memories, words of love. It was not enough, this one-sided conversation, it would never be enough, but it was all she had left.

Once she was spent, it was Roy’s turn. Lorna stepped back to give him some privacy, wiping her eyes and trying not to listen to his gruff words of sadness. Already she could feel the enormity of her pain receding a little for another year, as if a tide was washing away the top layer of heartache and taking it out to sea. Numbness was setting in, a welcome balm, and she shut her eyes, grateful for the weak sunshine and the birdsong. She felt exhausted by the ordeal, as she always did, but she was comforted – just a crumb – by the fact that Olivia would be there waiting for them at the cemetery gate.