At 4.30 a.m., Meg’s alarm woke her with a piercing beep-beep-beep, shrieking away a dream in which Colin’s Brother was heading to the finishing post but being strongly challenged, as she shouted encouragement at the top of her voice.

Avoiding the temptation to hit the snooze button and grab a few more precious minutes of sleep beneath the snug warmth of her duvet – and continue the dream – she swung her legs out of the bed and downed the glass of water beside her.

She had to get up now. No option. At 9 a.m., in less than five hours, she was presenting her company’s latest cough-and-cold remedy to the Tesco buying team, seventy miles of stressful traffic to the north of here. Normally, she’d have stayed at a Premier Inn close to the company’s headquarters. A ten-minute drive instead of the three hours facing her now, if she was lucky with the traffic. But this wasn’t a normal day.

Today, her daughter – and only surviving child – Laura, was heading off to Thailand and then on to Ecuador as part of her gap year. She and Laura had rarely been apart for more than a few days. They had always been close, but even closer since five years ago, when they’d been driving back to Brighton from a camping holiday in the Scottish Highlands.

Always car-sick, Laura sat in the front. After Nick had done a long spell at the wheel of their VW camper van, Bessie, Meg had taken over from her husband, who then sat in the back with their fifteen-year-old son Will, and had slept. As she’d slowed for roadworks on the M1, an uninsured plumber, busily texting his girlfriend, had ploughed his van into the back of their vehicle, killing Nick and Will instantly. She and Laura had survived, and their injuries had healed, but their lives would never be the same again – there was no going back to normal family life. Meg would have given anything to have even the most mundane day with her family one more time. Of course, friends and relatives had rallied around her and Laura in the days and months after the accident, when it felt as if they were living in a surreal bubble, but eventually and inevitably life went on, grief had to be dealt with, and as the years passed people stopped talking about Nick and Will.

Not one day went by when she didn’t think of them and what might have been.

Meg had stayed home to be with her daughter on what was to be their last night together for several months. This summer, Laura had saved up for this gap-year backpacking trip, with her best friend, before she went off to study Veterinary Science at the University of Edinburgh.