‘I’ll try my best, Gracie,’ I say, feeling my lip wobble as she brings me over the guitar from the stand where it’s been gathering dust for weeks and weeks now. ‘What would you like to hear? Any special requests?’

With the familiar cool feeling of the shiny dark wood in my hands, I twist the nuts to tune up, run my fingers down the bumps of the frets and feel the firm strings under my fingers.

A chorus of voices cheer from their desks and I manage to smile from ear to ear in a way I haven’t done in so long. Tears prick my eyes. There’s no doubt about it, music is what I’m meant to do in life, I just know it. Tom is right. It’s in my soul and it makes people happy to hear my songs just as much as it makes me happy to write and sing them.

‘Sing the one about the lucky number,’ says one of the Jackson twins from the second row of the small classroom. Even after teaching them for almost seven months, I still sometimes can’t tell the difference in the two little red-headed boys, which is made more difficult when they constantly swap seats to confuse me.

‘Ah, the lucky number song, of course,’ I say to a rapture of enthusiasm from the other twenty-five faces that stare back at me. ‘OK, I’ll give it a go.’

I quickly recount the words of the ‘lucky number song’ in my head, and to my delight and surprise they come flooding back like I’ve never stopped singing it.

I wrote it over a year ago for the pupils who were in my class and, as I think of life back then, I realize how much things have changed for me and all around me. The words of the song were penned right here at this very desk one evening after marking homework, long before Matthew’s accident, and long before I fell in love once more with Tom and then lost him again.

The song, a simple, gentle lullaby, was written to instil a sense of love and joy in such young innocent minds, based around the idea that we all have a lucky number, a sense of hope and a guardian angel. The words never fail to make me cry as I know it will do now, but in the nicest way, stripping the idea of happiness down to the simplest things in life like a hug, a smile or a kind word to another.