‘Well, it’s just that there’ll always be one person missing from these occasions, won’t there? Your dad. Whatever happened in the past, it will always be hard on your mum. She loved him so much.’

Ben stood up straight and stroked her bare arms contemplatively. It had taken him a long time and a lot of therapy, but he had long since forgiven Peter, reasoning that his dad had paid one hell of a price for his mistakes.

‘Well, maybe there is one way we could honour his memory and make sure there’s always a little part of him with us, and I think Mum would like it.’

Charlotte gazed up at Ben, thinking how much he looked like his dad. ‘OK. What did you have in mind?’

Ben took a deep breath, looking nervous. ‘We could call our son Peter … Although,’ he added hastily, ‘I would understand if you didn’t want to.’

Charlotte thought for a minute. ‘Even after everything that happened? You’d still do that?’ Charlotte narrowed her eyes, trying to see into the deepest recesses of Ben’s mind. They had taken the decision not to tell Jo the truth about Peter, not wanting to taint her memories and reasoning that what she didn’t know, couldn’t hurt her. But it had come at a price for Ben, who had struggled to carry the knowledge around, like a dead weight around his neck.

Ben smiled, but there was sadness in his expression. ‘I think it would help me. It’s my way of showing him that I forgave him. That I understand now that everything he did, he did out of love for me.’

Charlotte nodded, feeling like the luckiest woman in the world. She had come so close to losing everything and now she had it all. ‘How can I deny you anything, after all that you’ve been through? OK, my darling husband, Peter it is.’

Ben smiled and Charlotte could see that the years of pain had all but vanished. ‘You’re perfect,’ he said, stroking her face tenderly. ‘The perfect girl for me.’

Epilogue

Jo hoisted herself off the loft-ladder and stood upright, dusting herself down as she did so. The loft was a vast, low-ceilinged space that spanned the footprint of the entire house. She had never come up here when Peter was alive. She said it gave her the creeps, with all the cobwebs and dusty corners, hiding goodness knows what kind of creepy-crawlies.

But with Peter gone, there was no choice. She needed to find some documents relating to the money that Peter had given Ben and Bella to buy a house, just before his death. Unsurprisingly, Ben had wanted to sell the house in Surrey and for reasons that Jo didn’t quite understand, he was insistent that Peter’s money should be repaid to Jo, despite her protestations that she didn’t want it.

Ben and Elodie had moved in with Jo after Bella died in the car crash that night, so she figured that she could spend the money on them anyway, and make sure they wanted for nothing. If it made Ben feel better, then she was happy to go along with it. She had thought that once Ben and Charlotte got married and had baby Peter to complete their little family, they would want to move out into a place of their own. But neither of them wanted to.