Yes. Perhaps that was it? She’d just imagined seeing that ring – that very special and unique ring with a curve of emeralds arranged like shooting stars.

But she didn’t imagine it. She knew she didn’t, because she could see it clearly in her memory; she could still feel the coldness of the gold against her skin. It was definitely her shooting-star ring and it was definitely in Eddie’s workshop.

And then, of course, she realised. He had never intended to propose to her at Christmas. Of course he hadn’t. That wouldn’t be Eddie’s style at all. A Christmas announcement would be much too traditional for Eddie Quirke and a little part of Liv wanted to curse him for raising her expectations so foolishly, but instead she started to smile, because he would just ask her out of the blue. She didn’t expect him to go down on bended knee, and there was a good chance he would do something completely unconventional, something that in his mind was a grand gesture, but to hers would be… maybe a little… less than that. But he was still Eddie, her Eddie, and she would try to love it however he went about it.

The problem was that knowing it, now she would have to spend her whole time on her best behaviour so as not to put him off track if he’d already picked out a day in his head. Oh, Eddie. It wasn’t his fault; she knew that.

Clouds had covered over the moon and stars; there was nothing but a black ceiling above her, cutting off the heavens, or any shooting stars that Rachel might think of casting in her direction.

This was crazy. She needed to take the future into her own hands and make the most of the life before her. Hadn’t she enough to be worrying about? Wasn’t her dad’s angiogram enough to preoccupy her? She loved Eddie; that was the main thing. All the other little niggling things, like how long it was taking him to propose and the fact that she still couldn’t say she loved his mother – well, they were just periphery – when they were married, they wouldn’t matter one bit.

And Barbara Quirke wasn’t that bad; Christmas had gone off all right, hadn’t it? In the end. She could live with Barbara as her mother-in-law, so long as they didn’t come home too often and she closed her ears to her put-downs and curbed her inclination to tell her to mind her own business occasionally.