I made myself smile at her, despite everything, as she stood talking to Brian, the head removals man. She wore no make-up but she was beautiful, and beside her I felt so old and dried-up, though there couldn’t have been more than ten years between us. A widow. That’s what I was. The word itself aged me, as did the loss.

It was only as I got nearer, and she lifted her hand in a greeting, that I saw something I hadn’t prepared for at all. She was pregnant. And at once I found myself all at sea again, poleaxed with a pain so great I could hardly stand up.

I’d thought I was ready for the next step. Maybe I was wrong.

After Suzi went, I spent the rest of the day unpacking, trying to make the small damp place feel like home. It had been cleaned before I moved in, but not to my standards, so I had to leave the furniture in the middle of the room while I sponged skirting boards and dusted cobwebs. It went round and round in my head – she was pregnant. There would be a baby. Could I still be here, in that case? What did it mean for me? I had been so certain, but the knowledge made me falter in my plans. The cottage was so small, so ugly. And it was hard to get used to the silence out here, the fields that stretched out in every direction, the only noise the vague hum of the M25. The sense that nothing human was nearby, just bare trees, frozen ground.

Except Suzi, of course. My new neighbour. Standing at my own darkened window, I glimpsed her behind the sealed glass of their renovated cottage. It reminded me of Uplands, when I used to look out the glass panel of my room door at the other girls, who for all their feralness had a camaraderie of sorts. No one wanted to be friends with me, the possibly deranged posh girl. Ivy Cottage, that was the name of my house. Ivy that creeps, and clings. An invasive weed. And Suzi’s was Willow, willow that droops and bows, melancholy.