Gayle initially stiffened at the reminder of what she’d said at the party to Anna, but as she thought of her son, her eyes misted. ‘Of course.’

‘Then why is it so wrong for me to want the same – whatever shape that happiness comes in, whether it’s a man, or a new family, or something else?’

‘I suppose that’s reasonable, but…’

‘But?’ Anna prompted, not allowing her surprise at Gayle’s agreement to show.

Gayle looked her straight in the eye. ‘I suppose I don’t want you to replace him. I don’t want you to forget him.’

Anna leaned forward, tears suddenly hot behind her eyeballs. She wanted to reach for Gayle’s hand but wasn’t sure it would be welcome. ‘I will never forget Spencer,’ she said, then had to pause for a moment until she was able to speak again. ‘Could you?’

‘No!’

‘Then why do you assume I will?’

Gayle flashed that fierce but brittle look that Anna was starting to recognize. ‘But it will be like replacing him if you do find someone new, won’t it? There will be another man beside you at family functions, another man sleeping on his side of the bed.’

‘You have a new baby to fuss over and love, to take a gazillion snaps of to fill new photo albums. Does that mean you’ll love the son you lost less?’

Gayle pressed her lips together and shook her head. Anna handed her a serviette from the holder on the edge of the table.

‘And neither will I,’ she said, then reached for a napkin herself and blew her nose. ‘I will always love Spencer. Always!’

Gayle dabbed under her eyes with a corner of the rough tissue. ‘He’ll always be your first love,’ she said, nodding, not really asking a question but stating a fact. ‘And you’ll never love anyone the way you loved him.’ She looked at Anna with a mixture of hope and desperation in her eyes. ‘Because they won’t be Spencer. They won’t be him.’

‘No,’ Anna said, acknowledging the truth that no one ever would quite be like Spencer, while at the same time her last conversation with Brody came back to haunt her.

I can’t feel about you the way you want me to… Because you’re not Spencer…

Was that what she really wanted? Always to know the best was behind her? She brushed the thought away and turned back to her mother-in-law.

‘If we can, I’d like to put this behind us. And I’d like to remain part of your family because…’ she breathed in, staving off the tears, ‘because I love you all, and I know that’s what Spencer would have wanted. But we’ve got to start cutting each other some slack, Gayle. Are you willing to do that, no matter what we’ve said and done in the past? Can we try and start again, let our love for him keep us together instead of pushing us apart?’

At that moment Teresa arrived with a tray of cappuccinos, muttering something about incompetent staff and temperamental coffee machines. She put the tray on the table, sat down and looked first at Anna, then at Gayle. ‘Well?’