‘Hey.’ Ben sat down beside Emma, giving her a quick hug as he did so.

Emma gave him a wan half-smile. ‘Thanks for sorting everything out.’

Jo nodded her agreement. ‘Yes, thank you, darling.’

Ben tried to smile, thinking how tiny and frail Jo suddenly looked. She was a small woman anyway but she seemed to have shrunk into herself and aged a decade in just a few short hours.

‘Charlotte phoned,’ Emma said, breaking into his thoughts.

‘Did she?’

Emma nodded. ‘She spoke to Mum, too. It was nice of her.’

‘She loved Dad.’ Ben thought back over the various holidays, family meals and nights out that he and Charlotte had enjoyed with his parents. Charlotte had truly felt like part of the family, even more so after her own dad died. She and Peter had a warm, easy relationship and he knew that she would be deeply affected by his death.

There were no such happy memories of Peter and Bella and Ben felt a sudden, physical squeeze of pain that Elodie would never know her grandfather.

The weight of grief was already beginning to settle on his shoulders, the physical heaviness almost unbearable. ‘What do we do now?’ he said aloud, not really asking the question, just voicing his thoughts.

Emma reached out and took his hand in hers. ‘We carry on. That’s what we do.’

Chapter Fourteen

The day of the funeral dawned bright and sunny, with just the odd cloud scudding across a clear cobalt sky. Jo gazed up resentfully, thinking that it felt wrong, somehow. She wanted it to pour with rain and a thunderstorm to rent the heavens apart, with a viciousness to match her mood.

Two weeks on and she still felt hollowed-out with shock and grief. She had met Peter when she was 25 years old and she could no longer really remember her life before him. He was three years older than her and she had met him at a party in London, being thrown by her best friend’s brother.

She thought back to the tall, handsome man who had confidently introduced himself, looking at her with his smiling brown eyes and remembered that she had had an immediate, unshakable premonition that she would marry him.

But she had made him work hard to get her. She wasn’t going to fall into bed with him straight away and forced him to woo her for several weeks before she agreed to sleep with him. He sent flowers, took her for dinner and even rowed her around the Serpentine one particularly lovely, sunny afternoon, which was when she finally succumbed.

They married at a sweet little country church near her family home in Surrey and moved to their first house just outside Guildford. It wasn’t a big house but it was a beautiful, chocolate-box-style cottage with roses around the door and a garden big enough to accommodate a swing for Emma, once she came along. Peter commuted to his job in the city and they were deliriously happy.