Prue had seen Joe’s initial hurt turn to anger and resentment as he moved out of his dad’s home and took on the tenancy of the small self-contained flat that had once been the surgery behind her mum and dad’s house. Her heart had gone out to him. As an only child, and an only grandchild, she had never had to vie for attention, never had to share, certainly never seen herself as second best, and she found it hard to imagine how it must feel. Poor Joe.

He’d lived away from the village long enough, he’d said, what with uni and then that job up north that he’d left only a year ago. Why had he come back home? Certainly not to spend more time with his brother and his dad. Had something gone wrong with his job? His life? Prue wondered why he had never explained, or even tried to. Still, he was back in Norfolk now, where he insisted he belonged, and he wasn’t going to let his family problems drive him away, even if it meant living alone. She’d foolishly allowed herself to believe that she might be the reason he had come back home, that his heart was telling him he belonged with her, but of course that wasn’t true. She knew that now.

Why was it that her thoughts always came back to Joe? Because she loved him, she supposed. Or had thought she did. She had felt safe with him, and comfortable, but that wasn’t love, was it? It was friendship and familiarity, and gratitude. An acceptance of what she had and a fear of letting that all go if she were ever to take that scarily dangerous step and reach out for something more.

They had been friends for as long as she could remember. Her and Joe, Ralph and Sian, their own little gang of four, until, somewhere along the way, as they all got older, things had started to change. Sian and Ralph had fallen for each other. In an innocent, teenage way at first, but it was clear sometimes that they just wanted to be by themselves, just the two of them, leaving Prue and Joe behind, forced to find a way to rub along together, more and more often, without their partners in crime.

In time, with teenage hormones doing their thing, Prue had begun to look forward to being alone with Joe. She’d started to notice his eyes, his hands, what he was wearing, the smell of him, the feel of him. There had been a gradual, gentle move towards the holding of hands, tentative experimental kisses on the way back from school, out of sight, on the corner, before she turned into the lane that led her home. How much of it had happened simply because the others were doing it, she could never be sure, but they’d gone to the cinema together too, her and Joe, sharing tubs of popcorn, her head resting sleepily on his shoulder on the way home on the bus, and sometimes, once they were old enough, he would ring and ask if she fancied a drink and they’d meet in The Brown Cow, have a game of darts, a bag of crisps, a laugh. Looking back now, she couldn’t help wondering if that was all it had ever been to him. A laugh? A casual thing. Not the romance she had imagined it to be. Needed it to be. Not the real thing at all.