She tried to help but was shooed away, so she slid into her normally assigned seat at the bottom of the table. Spencer’s dad, Richard, winked at Anna, making her feel slightly less as if she had her tail between her legs for being late. Spencer had taken after his father, a man who had, apparently, been telling ‘dad jokes’ well before he’d actually become a dad. Anna gave him a conspiratorial smile back and felt her shoulder muscles unclench.

When lunch was over, they retired to the living room. This was Anna’s favourite part of the afternoon. The tradition had started right after Spencer had died. To while away the hours doing something other than drinking endless cups of tea, they’d looked through the photo albums together, trying to pick a few for the upcoming funeral.

It hadn’t been an easy job to narrow it down to just a couple. With his mischievous blue eyes and boyish grin, Spencer had been very photogenic. And even after the funeral, they’d kept going with it. It had been comforting to see him smiling back from the pages at them, just being Spencer. It still was.

Gayle went to the special shelf on the bookcase that contained the large albums, all arranged in date order, and pulled one from the left-hand end.

Toddler pics? Again? It seemed an awfully long time since they’d looked at anything from the other end of the shelf, from any of the albums Anna might have a chance of featuring in, and she really could do with seeing some solid evidence of her time together with Spencer today, because everything seemed to be upside-down and back-to-front. An anchor of some sort might have been helpful.

She nodded along as usual anyway as Gayle leafed through the album, making the appropriate noises at the right times, and it wasn’t hard to do because she did love seeing all these favourite pictures of her husband – the one of him on top of a lion in Trafalgar Square, or the one of him with the snowman he’d built in the back garden.

Anna looked over at her mother-in-law, with her perfectly coiffed, Mary Berry-style hairdo, her erect posture and precise movements. Her fierce loyalty and protectiveness towards her family were truly admirable, but they came with a downside. Gayle was the sort of mother who believed no woman was good enough for her baby boys, and it had taken a while for Anna not to feel like an outsider at family gatherings.

But after Spencer had died, that had changed. Gayle had clung to her, opened her arms and welcomed Anna into the family in a way she never had before. They were united in their loss, their grief. She’d needed Anna. Both Scott and Richard didn’t do emotion, one buttoning down hard, the other finding safety in humour when things got too much, so Anna had been the one person Gayle had been able to talk to. They’d cried and laughed and remembered together.