That was when she had given in and succumbed to the charms of another man. Luke. They’d met through work, on a photo-shoot. His sister’s wedding. He had been dressed to the nines – grey suit, white shirt, shiny shoes, pink rose – and he had looked good, even more so when viewed in soft focus through the lens of her camera. He was what she would call photogenic. The camera loved him. And people did too. He was tall, handsome, funny, and more than a little drunk. He had deep brown eyes and slightly-too-long dark blond hair, and one of those sexy little-boy-lost smiles no girl could resist. And he was alone. No plus one. Until he had caught her eye and taken the camera from her hand, put it down on a table and led her onto the dancefloor. For an hour or so she had melted into his chest, moved with the music, wrapped up in his arms, stopped being the photographer and become … What had she become? Happy, carefree, besotted …

Luke didn’t live locally. They had tried to make it work. Five months of exhausting and expensive train trips, long lonely drives, meals in restaurants that had to be cut short because one or other of them had work in the morning and a long journey home, weekends in hotels that had been wonderful while they lasted, but always ended in the same way. Distance, absence, and neither of them sure enough or brave enough to make the move the relationship needed if it had any chance of survival.

It was Prue who ended it. She could picture him now, the sad puppy-dog eyes that showed regret but no sign of actual tears, the final wave as she drove away. Back to Shelling and familiarity, and to waiting, as she always had, for Joe Barton to come home and claim her.

She finished her food and screwed up the paper bag, sucked hard on her straw, aiming for the final mouthful of milk and making a loud slurping noise that had the man at the next table looking up at her and laughing. She laughed back.

It was time to head back to Madi’s flat and wrap up her mum’s present. She’d found her a lovely silky square scarf, in a swirl of purples and reds, which reminded her, in some crazy way, of Madi’s décor. It was just the sort of big bold scarf that her mum would never have bought for herself, especially if she had seen the price tag, but would love anyway. And it would be easy to fold and wrap, and light enough not to cost the earth to post. Time to break the mould and be spontaneous, unexpected, surprising. She liked the idea of that. A new, surprising Prue Harris.

She spent the evening transferring her most recent photos onto the laptop and editing them, cropping and trying out various effects and filters, until she was happy enough to choose one as her new desktop background, and to earmark another couple for a competition she had been thinking of entering.