‘I had a feeling something wasn’t right in the summer holidays,’ she explained. ‘Usually I find I’m back on form for the start of the new term, but this year I wasn’t so I took myself along to see lovely Doctor Harris and the rest, as they say, is history, or it soon will be.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ I whispered.

I couldn’t believe she hadn’t told me before. That she’d lived with the knowledge all these months and not said a word. Why had she done that?

‘Why didn’t you say anything sooner?’ I asked, then I realised. ‘Oh Dolly,’ I choked, ‘you knew when you came to see me in September, didn’t you? Is that why you came to find me at the flat the day I was made redundant?’

She nodded.

‘And I was so full of self,’ I said, hating myself for being so caught up in my own dilemma that I hadn’t picked up on hers, ‘that I never noticed.’

‘What was there to notice?’ She shrugged. ‘I’d hardly gone out and had a T-shirt printed announcing the fact, had I? You weren’t to know.’

‘But why didn’t you say anything after?’ I cried. ‘Why didn’t you tell me when you invited me to stay?’

‘Because,’ she said with a heavy sigh, ‘I wanted you to come for the right reasons and not with the knowledge of this hanging over you. I wanted to give you some time away from Jonathan with no strings attached. Some time to be free, if you like.’

‘I see.’

‘And it did the trick, didn’t it?’ she said, smiling again and sounding rather pleased with herself. ‘You didn’t know about my illness, so you weren’t fretting about me and my failing organs.’

I couldn’t help but flinch when she sounded so blasé.

‘Coming to Wynbridge and making friends with Beamish opened your eyes and helped you make the decision to break things off with Jonathan, didn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ I agreed, ‘yes I suppose it did, in part.’

Then wasn’t the time to tell her that keeping Jonathan a secret had ultimately cost me my precious friendship with Beamish.

‘I have to admit,’ she said, her eyes narrowing as her tone sharpened, ‘Jonathan had me under his spell too for a while, what with that fancy hamper and his honeyed words.’

‘Well, under the circumstances—’ I began to say.

‘Never mind the circumstances,’ she cut in, ‘we got there in the end.’

She sounded relieved and I guessed there were more loose ends that she wanted to tie up before too much sand slipped into the wrong end of her hourglass.

‘And the Wish List,’ I said, nodding to where it was pinned up next to the fire.