Tim’s most of the way through his Ob/Gyn placement – thankfully, for both their sakes, he wasn’t on duty when my sister gave birth to my gorgeous niece, Ava, a Bonfire Night baby. He’s finding it tough juggling the placement and his finals revision, but he’s still pulling his weight. Whenever I get home from a twelve-hour shift, the house is immaculate, dinner is ready and he’s almost pathologically upbeat.

‘Got plans tonight?’ my colleague Mo asks as we mummify ourselves in fleece layers in the locker room, bracing ourselves for the hail we can hear ricocheting off the pavement outside.

‘Seeing an old friend.’ The slightest charge goes through me when I say it. The same charge I felt when he called asking to meet.

Joel picks me up in Ant’s van, and when I climb in, he leans over to give me a lightning fast peck on the cheek. Yes, old friends, that’s what we are.

As he drives along the front, the radio plays Girls Aloud murdering ‘I’ll Stand by You’. Wind whips across from the sea and the string lights look as though they’ll be torn free. I take surreptitious looks at him and am pleased with what I see. Joel looks even fitter than he did for the triathlon, and he sits upright in the driver’s seat.

We turn left up Old Steine and head out of the centre. ‘Where are you taking me?’

‘Magical mystery tour, remember? Settle back and enjoy the ride.’

We travel up the Lewes Road, then take a right and wind through the twisting roads of the estate. Joel parks outside a community hall that reminds me of the St John Ambulance Cadets HQ, where Tim and I spent countless hours on moody nights like this one.

‘Ready to find out what I’ve been up to?’

Joel pushes the wooden door open. Inside, a bearish man in a tracksuit is laying out gym mats, hoops and skipping ropes on the worn parquet floor. When he looks up, I realize he has a ring of tinsel around his neck, like a dog collar.

‘All right, Greenaway. How’s your week going?’

Joel goes over to the man, and they shake hands in a blokeish way before he calls me over. ‘Kerry, come and meet Steve. He’s been keeping me out of trouble for a few months now.’

Steve can’t help crushing my fingers in his spade-sized paw.

‘Hi, I’m a friend of Joel’s—’ I start to say.

‘I think you’re more than that, aren’t you, darling? Joel told me the whole story.’

‘Er, no—’ What the hell has Joel been saying?

‘I mean, you brought him back to life, didn’t you? That makes you a lot more than a friend, in my eyes. A guardian angel, in fact.’