The mistral blows harder. It can send people mad, they say. I pull my arms around myself, holding my face to the warm wind, closing my eyes against the dust, feeling the change in the air on my skin.

‘Where shall we start?’ says smiling Lexie.

I open my eyes and turn to the packed boxes stacked on the furniture that is going back into a truck, and possibly storage, if the rental house doesn’t have room for it. ‘Anywhere you like.’ I try to smile back, feeling drained and exhausted. The boxes had barely been unpacked before I was packing them again. Some haven’t been unpacked at all and I have no idea what’s in them. Most of the photographs never made it on to shelves, but, then, that’s a blessing as I hate having photographs of myself staring at me when I walk into a room. In our last house, Ollie insisted on having framed photographs in the hall and up the stairs. Us on our wedding day. His graduation picture. A picture of the two of us at his cousin’s baby’s christening. I thought I looked dreadful in that one but he liked it, said it was lovely of the two of us. To me, it just reminded me of how I’d felt that day: happy for the new parents but hollow and empty inside. It wasn’t long after Mum died.

And I’m not sure which loss people meant when they said they were sorry for mine. I was sorry for my loss too. Both of them. Losing my mum and my final chance to be a mum myself. Just before we decided to move out here, which was soon after Ollie bought Ralph. I say we decided … It was Ollie’s dream. He’d become addicted to A New Life in the Sun and Escape to the Chateau, when he was made redundant, and thought that this farmhouse, with its peach-coloured stone walls and peeling painted shutters, was the answer to all our problems.