Having made the decision, she acted quickly, contacting the next day a local dealer who specialized in classic cars. Serendipitously, it turned out she’d been cutting his daughter-in-law’s hair for years, and so she knew he wasn’t about to stitch her up. Indeed, once he saw the car himself and had taken it for a test run, he offered Alison such a good price that she thought she might pass out with shock. A lump sum like that would mean she could retire a bit earlier, if she felt like it, she realized in a daze. It would mean she could help out Robyn financially too, if things became tricky following her marriage breakdown. And bugger it, she could even treat herself to a new runaround, seeing as the ancient Honda Jazz she drove had been so temperamental last winter.

‘You’re on,’ she’d said, shaking his hand and not feeling the slightest ache of guilt or sadness as he drove the car away. Quite the contrary, actually – she stood there in the empty space of the garage and could almost feel the air trembling with expectation. Whatever Fate offers me next, I’m going to take it, she found herself thinking with a smile on her face. I’m going to say yes.

Fate, like Alison herself, did not muck about, in this instance. Later that evening, she was tackling her accounts at the kitchen table when a notification flashed in the bottom right corner of the laptop screen, letting her know that she had a new friend request on Facebook.

Alison didn’t have much time for Facebook, truth be told: the whole thing seemed like one never-ending parade of people showing off about some achievement or other. ‘Bully for you,’ she found herself muttering sardonically whenever she bothered to look at her timeline, wading through the stream of information that, more often than not, only served to make her feel inadequate. Clicking through now, to see who had sent the friend request, she found it hard to muster up any real enthusiasm; it would almost certainly be a client or maybe someone she’d been at school with in Bournemouth, about whom she hadn’t thought for fifty years. Yeah, whatever. She would accept the request, like she always did, without it really meaning anything.

But then she saw the name there in her notifications list and found herself gasping aloud and peering closer, in a classic double-take. Thomas Naylor? Gosh. It couldn’t be, could it?