It had been a very long time since Bonnie had let herself think about Seth Cooper. Back in 1992, when she had returned home to New Zealand from England, forever changed but determined not to let on why, both Seth and baby Evangeline had plagued her thoughts on a daily basis. She had veered from regret to sadness to relief to guilt and back again – it was a seemingly never-ending cycle of confused emotion, and far from dissipating along with her post-pregnancy hormones, the feelings had intensified, building up to a crescendo of catastrophic misery.

It was during those days of total and utter despair that Bonnie had come the closest to confessing everything to her elderly parents, but fear always stopped her in the end. She told herself that they would be angry and disappointed, but what scared her the most was the possibility that they would want her to take it all back. And she couldn’t do that, not even if she wanted to. She had made her decision, and she was adamant that she must stick to it no matter what.

Now, however, Bonnie had to try and recall all those mixed emotions. She had to go back even further, back to the day she had first met Seth Cooper, and try to make sense of what followed. She wanted her daughter to understand, but she, Bonnie, needed to understand, too.

Tracey had just brought her up a cup of tea, and Bonnie took a fortifying sip, trying her best to cast her mind back to that fateful afternoon. Closing her eyes, she pictured the cosy but cluttered interior of Sunrise Café as it was then, with its scrubbed Formica tables and polished wooden floor. She remembered how the coffee machine used to hum when it was idle, and how the smell of frying bacon would waft up the back stairs from the kitchen. There was a bell above the door that jangled whenever customers came in, and Bonnie knew that sound would have heralded the arrival of Seth. She would have looked up in greeting, perhaps smiled the only genuine smile that he would ever see on her face. Because after that she was always too self-conscious, aware of how he saw her, and how her gestures would be interpreted. She never had been able to fully relax around him.

That was it, she thought, reaching at last for her pen. She had her starting point.