Kate opens them like a surprised child. Bex’s kitchen has been decked out with balloons and banners, a large ‘Welcome Home’ strung across the dresser. Bex has always loved throwing parties – ‘Jacob’s joins’, as she calls them, where everyone brings along a dish. All Kate’s old friends from the village are here. Jake too, standing at the back, stooped a little because of the low ceiling. Kate wants to cry, but she knows she must hold it together. This is her past, but it’s also her future.

And then she spots Stretch, who trots over to see her, and she is unable to hold back the tears any longer.

‘Weenie toes,’ she says, scooping him up.

‘And he’s got a bestie,’ Bex says, looking across at Jake. The crowds part and Kate sees another dachshund, tiny in Jake’s big arms. It must be the one from the house in Brittany. She hobbles over and takes it from him.

‘Hey, he’s mine,’ Jake says, pretending to hang on to him. ‘He’s called Banger,’ he adds, as she holds the two dogs up to her face. ‘DI Hart’s choice.’

She kisses both dogs. And then she kisses Jake too. Nothing lingering – it’s early days – but a cheer still goes up around them.

‘Like the dress,’ Jake whispers.

‘Thanks,’ she says.

It’s the orange one he retrieved from the canal – and still reeks of diesel.

They’ve talked a lot in the past week, starting with her rescue, how he managed to resuscitate her – ‘just like jump-starting an engine,’ he’d quipped. And then they talked more seriously. She’s even let him try to explain what happened at the shopping centre. She can’t forgive him. Not yet. He was by her hospital bedside all the time in France and then he took her to her mum’s, where she stayed for a few days. It was healing to stand back from everything, try to get some perspective on all that’s happened. She still can’t believe what Rob was planning to do to her – to her brain.

‘You alright?’ Bex says, finding her on her own in the kitchen a few minutes later.

She’s lucky to have Bex as her best friend. ‘Fine,’ she says, looking out of the window into the garden, where Jake is talking to a couple of friends she remembers from the canal. Single men in their forties, both fleeing broken marriages, trying to start again. Stretch and Banger are chasing each other around the flowerbeds.

‘He’s alright, is Jake,’ Bex says, clocking the direction of her gaze. ‘Pulled his finger out when it really mattered. Managing to suss what Rob was about. Going looking for you like that. Not such a lazy git after all.’

It’s good to hear Bex say nice things about him. For so long she disapproved of Jake.