Usually I loved spending time with my nan but today my mind was somewhere else. With someone else.

‘If you need to go and be with that young man of yours…’ Nan smiled kindly. Behind me I could sense Mum shaking her head in a don’t-mention-Adam way.

‘I’m not seeing him this weekend, Nan.’ I wasn’t sure if I’d ever see him again.

‘You’ll see him soon enough,’ Mum said briskly. She was trying to cheer me up but it still felt dismissive. ‘I’m going to make some sandwiches.’ She disappeared into the kitchen.

‘If you’ve had a falling-out with Adam, sort it out. Life’s too short.’ Nan’s eyes misted and I knew she was thinking of Grandad. It had been years since he had died but she still missed him. We all did. There was a pause while we were both lost in our own thoughts, gazing out at the garden, which was a riot of spring colour. Nan was looking directly at the tangle of yellow and pink flowers that fought for space in her pots, but from the expression on her face I knew she was only seeing her past. I wanted her to share that with me.

‘Nan?’ I tucked my legs under me on the sofa. ‘If you’d known how much it hurt to be without Grandad, would you still have fallen in love with him?’

‘Anna, you can’t choose who you fall in love with. I knew that very first night we met that I’d spend the rest of my life with him.’

‘Tell me again about your first meeting.’

‘You’re not testing my memory, are you?’ Nan narrowed her eyes. ‘Because despite what that doctor who doesn’t look old enough to have left school says, there’s nothing wrong with me.’

‘I just like hearing it.’ I was a hopeless romantic although I was feeling more hopeless than anything else, glancing at my phone again. Nothing.

‘I was a waitress and Grandad came in for his lunch. I served him faggots and gravy and he asked what time my shift ended. It had only just begun and so he sat there drinking coffee for five hours, waiting for me. At dead on five when I’d finished, he walked over to the jukebox and put on Elvis’s ‘Love me Tender’ and asked me to dance. It wasn’t the place for dancing, but we did, in between the tables, my boss glaring at me. Before the song had finished, I had fallen head over heels for your grandad.’

Listening to their story always made me emotional but today, more than ever, I felt Nan’s hope, her joy, her certainty. I felt it all in the way I had with Adam at the airport. How had we gone so wrong? I wiped my eyes.

‘Anna. If it’s meant to be, it will be,’ Nan said.