‘Well, that’s where you’re wrong,’ he said firmly. ‘I absolutely do want to know. And I love you every bit as much as I did before this all happened. So there.’

Maybe it was the extra-strength painkillers making her feel strange, but it was as if a hard, granite lump inside Bunny was loosening its bonds, turning soft and liquid, draining away. Hope burst within her. ‘Do you really—’ she began, but all of a sudden Dave was getting off his seat and kneeling down on the hospital floor.

‘Bunny, also known as Rachel,’ he began.

‘Dave!’ she squeaked, hardly able to believe what was happening.

‘Would you make me the happiest man in Yorkshire and do me the honour of becoming my wife?’

‘Dave!’ she yelped again. ‘Are you . . . are you actually serious?’

‘Oh my God, listen, Derek,’ she heard Elsie saying in hushed tones on the other side of the curtain.

‘I have never been more serious,’ Dave pronounced. ‘Will you marry me?’

Once again, tears were glistening in Bunny’s eyes, but these were good tears. Happy tears. ‘Yes,’ she managed to say. ‘Oh yes!’

‘Did you hear that? She said yes!’ Elsie cried, in a shamelessly unsubtle way, but Bunny didn’t care. In fact, she didn’t care about anything other than Dave leaning over and kissing her so tenderly, so lovingly, that she never wanted him to stop.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Six

Paula was having a good day. She’d just shown a very keen couple around an extremely nice townhouse a stone’s throw from the Minster and was confident they’d be after a second viewing, if not making an offer, within forty-eight hours. The property was one of those rare unicorn-like beasts in York – a Georgian property that had been beautifully restored, with no ongoing chain – the sort that you could move into immediately and feel completely at home in. The keys still jangling in her pocket (she’d take them back to the office tomorrow), she was now following a white-uniformed waitress and her mother downstairs to the lower lounge at Betty’s, where they had arranged to meet for tea and a catch-up. Yes, she was sloping off work an hour early, again. No, she didn’t feel the slightest twinge of guilt about this transgression.