Jai was on the other side of Sasha, holding her hand. I was glad, for her sake, that he wanted to be involved with Raffy now, but selfishly I didn’t want him to move in with us and change the way everything worked. I was, however, doing my best to be nice. I knew I needed to try to be grown up about it because I was seventeen next month, and life moved fast. I couldn’t keep Raffy from his father and, when it came down to it, I didn’t want to.

Zara turned and waved at me and Izzy, and we waved back. I knew it was a strange experience for these little girls, to be at the funeral of the uncle they’d never known. I was picking them up from school one day a week now, and I was intensely relieved that Gus hadn’t stopped that when it turned out that my father had killed his brother. That was quite a thing. He and Abby had been incredibly kind about it, and kept saying that I’d been the one who’d brought some peace to their family, that as I hadn’t even been born I could hardly blame myself for what my dad had done. They were going to get married next summer, now that they had an answer about Joe.

Abby was sitting close to Gus, her hand on his knee, and I hoped that one day I might have someone I’d be that close to. It could never have been Joe, and although Jack and Finn had done a lot to pull me back to the present day, it wasn’t either of them either. Finn and I had had a couple more dates after that terrible one, but it had never taken off. He was seeing someone else now and I didn’t mind at all.

I imagined Joe right here beside me, holding my hand. Joe, two years younger than I was. I imagined it so hard that I truly believed he was sitting there, at his own funeral. It was, to be fair, exactly the kind of place where he would turn up.

I looked at him. He smiled. I tried to touch him, but my hand met Izzy’s thigh, and she reached down and squeezed it. Joe leaned forward and whispered in my ear: ‘I love you and I always will. You’re the love of my life, and my afterlife.’ Then he was gone, and it was just Izzy. She was real.

I shivered all over. I would hold on to Joe and his love for the rest of my life, and I would hold on to my best friend too, for as long as I possibly could. Raffy was dozing in Sasha’s arms, and I stroked his little nose with a fingertip.