Laurel kept wanting to believe life worked out in the end, that there was a reason bad things happened, that silver linings existed even when she hadn’t found them yet. That it was all ahead of her, all still going to happen. The miracle. The magic. Not just with finding Mr Right, but with everything. With this.

And so, like with everything else, she’d held onto that hope with Zac. Unfortunately, he had not shared her optimism.

The initial awkwardness she had understandably anticipated hadn’t morphed into the friendly let’s-get-to-know-each-other sesh that Laurel had been counting on. Her expansive offer of takeaway wasn’t seen as a treat but a given; her attempts at conversation had been utterly shut down before she’d barely begun, and a hostility had emanated from Zac towards her that left her feeling hurt and raw even as she told herself not to take it personally.

Sometimes, when a fourteen-year-old was giving her a glare of death and an eye roll for the twentieth time that hour, it was hard not to.

It had all taken Laurel rather miserably by surprise. The last time she’d seen Zac, during a fly-by visit to London a few years ago when Abby had reluctantly agreed to meet up, he’d been a round-faced eleven-year-old, puberty no more than a faint cloud on the horizon. He’d doodled on his placemat and asked her questions about football, and actually listened to her, admittedly ignorant, answers. Still, he’d been sweet.

The gangly six-two stranger her nephew had turned into during the intervening years had completely taken her aback. His voice was deep, his attitude irritable or indifferent in turns, and his fingers appeared to be glued to his phone. Laurel didn’t know what to do with any of it. She realised a Happy Meal and a game of Go Fish wasn’t going to cut it, not by a long mark.

She still didn’t understand why Abby had separated herself from her family as soon as she’d left for university, visits a thing of the past, phone calls and emails eventually going unreturned. Laurel had never worked up the courage to ask her, had felt too hurt and even betrayed to dare to voice it out loud, afraid of what the answer might be even as she knew no answer would satisfy, no reason would be good enough to justify her sister’s behaviour.

Anyway, back at the beginning, she’d been able to convince herself it wasn’t as bad as it had felt; Abby was busy, she’d come home at Christmas, she had answered that email, even if it was only one line. Don’t be so sensitive, Laurel had told herself, but eventually that kind of optimistic talking-to wore thin, and been replaced with both confusion and a deep, abiding hurt that Laurel told herself she’d got past a long time ago.

At least, after Zac had been born, as far as Laurel could tell with no father in the picture, Abby had grudgingly agreed to see Laurel a couple of times, but the visits had been few and far between, a stilted lunch and one afternoon in Hamley’s, with Laurel fobbing off the confusion and sorrow she felt with an overpriced teddy bear that Zac had hurled to the ground.