Once back at the house, she went straight through to the garage, where Rich’s car had been standing since the day she’d moved in – undriven, unappreciated, unused. If you didn’t count her sitting in it every now and then and having a little cry, that was.

Glancing around the garage, she realized – for the first time, really, if she was honest – that the space there was pretty decent. That if she sold the car, and got rid of all the boxes of junk lining the walls, she could easily slap on a few coats of emulsion and maybe put a proper warm carpet down over the concrete floor, to cheer it up a bit. With better lighting – maybe even some windows – this could become a usable extra room in the house: an office, perhaps, for sorting out her paperwork, or a sewing room, where she could spread out her fabrics and leave her machine rigged up in one place, rather than having to clear the dining table every time she wanted to make something. She could even put a treadmill in here, use it as a little gym space to keep herself fit, she thought, her eyes widening at the possibilities; at all these productive, energetic new versions of herself that had come strolling into her imagination. In fact the more she thought about it, the more she decided that the garage was absolutely wasted on this old car, however sentimental she might feel about it.

And at the end of the day the Jensen was only a car: pieces of metal, tyres, mechanics. It wasn’t Rich, and it wasn’t going to bring him back. The truth of the matter was that having it under her roof just made her feel sad. ‘We had some lovely times together,’ she said, using the words Emily had given her, with one hand on the bonnet. ‘But now it’s time for us to go our separate ways.’ She waited for the pang to hit her, as it had done in the past whenever Robyn had gone on at her about selling. This time it was more of a twinge, though. She could live with a twinge.