‘I’m sure the last thing Hattie wants is to be traipsing about picking up after me,’ she had told Mr Lucca. ‘The poor girl will be bored witless by the time I’m well enough to go home.’

Thankfully the Luccas knew best and had stuck to their guns and Dolly’s concerns were completely unfounded. I discovered in her a sympathetic confidante and we ended up spending a very companionable two weeks together. I had never had the opportunity to spend so much time with someone her age before – my grandparents had gone long before I was old enough to form memories of them – and having no children of her own meant I filled the role of granddaughter for her.

She hadn’t been able to heal my recently broken heart – nothing was capable of that – but she had stopped me from severing all ties with my parents, imploring me to give things time to settle. We chatted together for hours and she told me all about her life in Wynbridge and her job as a teaching assistant, scattering her monologues with hilarious classroom anecdotes, and when I escorted her back home, I fell in love with both her beautiful cottage and the town as well as her working life.

As a result, during the years that followed I became a regular visitor, even occasionally volunteering alongside her in the school and eventually falling to wonder if I should consider a career in education myself. I loved working with the children and was certainly capable of doing the job, but I never took the plunge. Swiftly promoted when the Luccas left, and with a pay rise to match, I stayed working at the hotel and my plans soon became nothing more than an eventually forgotten daydream played out on the train to and from Wynbridge.

Glossy, groomed, efficient and the consummate professional, I was now knocking on the door of thirty and matched the transformed hotel and the manager’s expectations to a T. Or at least I thought I did. Dolly hadn’t stayed since the hotel’s overhaul – she hadn’t been impressed by the plasma TVs and sleek electric curtains – but she was proud of my achievements and we still kept in touch. Not quite as regularly as before, and increasingly by telephone rather than me visiting her in person since I had started dating Jonathan a couple of years ago, but she was always there when I needed her and boy, did I need her now.

Jonathan had never been able to understand why I was best friends with someone five decades older and, having no grandparents of his own and no other older influence in his life, couldn’t grasp it when I tried to explain, but Dolly was my best friend and after such a disastrous day she was always going to be my first port of call.

‘Hattie?’