I pack my travel guide into a bag, along with some sun cream, an extra toggle – mine are forever snapping under the weight of my hair – and a bottle of water, and head off in the direction of Queenstown Gardens beside the lake.

It is not yet ten a.m., but already groups of young travellers are stretched out in rows on the tiny beach. It baffles me how they can lounge there all day. What was it Anna always used to say as she rubbed cream into my bare skin as a child? ‘There’s no such thing as a healthy tan.’

I reach the gardens and pause for a moment to gaze up between the branches of the red-and-black oak trees. The flat leaves are barely stirring in the calm, still air, and I can hear the insistent buzz of insects busily going about their days.

As before, the lure of the lake proves too strong to resist, and I pick my way slowly over the stony shoreline, passing an idle tyre swing hanging from a willow branch, before settling down on a clear patch of ground. I’m wearing pale-blue denim shorts and a thin green shirt today, which I’ve knotted at my waist. I haven’t bothered with make-up, save for a light coating of mascara, and my only jewellery is my treasured jade-stone ring and some gold stud earrings.

How Anna would have loved this place, I can’t help but think, just as I did the first time I ventured into these gardens. How cruel and unfair that she will never get to see it. If I could swap places with her now, be gone while she lives on, then I would.

I’m just about to take my book out of my bag when there’s a loud shriek from somewhere behind the treeline and a girl erupts down the bank and runs with arms flailing to the water’s edge, barely pausing for breath before jumping up and leaping on to the tyre swing. A moment later, a small dog follows suit, yapping excitedly at the girl’s feet as she lifts them upwards.

‘Tui,’ I whisper in recognition, just as a loud male voice bellows her name, and the next moment Kit is through the trees, too, a grin on his face and a Frisbee in his hand.

‘If you keep running off like a naughty little puppy,’ I hear him say to Tui, ‘then I’ll have no choice but to put you on a lead.’

I should stand up, or call out to them, but before I have a chance to decide which, Kit turns his head and sees me sitting there.

‘Genie?’ he calls, and I nod, lifting a hand of greeting that turns into a wave.

‘Hey.’

Kit’s smile spreads even wider as he starts crunching over the stones towards me.