She hadn’t thought she would sleep at all, but she must have, because when she’d opened her eyes it was gone six and the children weren’t jumping up and down on her bed and Rory was nowhere to be seen. Next to her head on her pillow though, there had been a tiny square-shaped parcel, wrapped in gold paper and tied with a deep red ribbon.

Had Rory left it? Sue had picked it up gingerly, wondering if it had originally been intended for Vivien, but when she looked at the handwriting on the tag, it wasn’t Rory’s, and the message was rather cryptic to say the least.

‘Christmas wishes only come true if you let them.’

Sue carefully untied the ribbon and opened the box. Inside, nestled on some cotton wool, was a silver Christmas pudding-shaped pendant necklace, set with tiny red gems. As soon as Sue saw it she thought of her dinner with Blake at the Pickled Egg, and she smiled. Looking again at the card, she saw that it was signed off with an ‘N’. Nick? Sue was still yet to work out how the gift got there, and how Nick could have known to choose something so … meaningful. As she’d put the pendant around her neck, she went to look out of the window, and saw the very last thing she could have expected in Poldore: fragile, beautiful, perfect flakes of snow drifting down from the sky. Nick had been right, it seemed.