Bridie had watched that particular episode at least twenty-five times. After eleven series the show had ended, and all they had was a videotape of twenty programmes that Bridie watched over and over again. Maisie squeezed the teabag: her mother liked her tea strong. She reviewed the colour, not deep enough. She swirled it around the cup and squeezed again.

There had been a time when she would have confided in her mother about the date – she might even have shared a smidgen of the excitement that was quietly building, despite her reservations and her determination to end things before they began. She wondered what her ma might have said when she still had her faculties. Bridie had liked Fred: she’d described him as a good man. She’d always had a smile for him and insisted he never left her house without a slice of cake to take away. ‘A man like him shouldn’t be alone,’ she’d said once, but she hadn’t expanded. Bridie had never shown an interest in finding a man to replace Arthur, even though she’d only just celebrated her thirty-fifth birthday when he’d died of a massive heart attack in his own bed.

In the first few years after her separation Maisie had been so raw and scarred that she couldn’t bring herself even to think about being with another man, and by the time the wounds had healed, Bridie was acting a little strangely. Within a short space of time, Maisie’s greatest support had become another burden. Maisie worked hard to keep everything together but she was struggling to keep her head above water. She was exhausted most of the time, stretched so thinly in a constant battle to compensate whichever family member she felt she’d let down. She hated second-guessing herself and she had tried to stop but it was like asking a bee to stop buzzing. Impossible. It wasn’t just Danny who had sown the seeds of self-doubt in her: she did it to herself. Her mother used to tell her, ‘Maisie Bean, you’re your own worst enemy. Nobody’s perfect. Do your best, that’s all you can do and it’s good enough.’