‘You have tasted this, right?’ he asked, clearly offended that I thought his reaction was over the top.

‘Oh. My. God,’ I mimicked as I swallowed the sweet, moist mouthful down.

‘Exactly,’ he grinned. ‘Thank you.’

‘It’s so good,’ I laughed.

‘So good,’ he agreed.

We sat in silence for a few seconds, chewing, smiling and swallowing until all that were left were a few tiny crumbs that even Bruce would have been hard pushed to sniff out.

‘You know,’ said Joe, picking up his tea, ‘over the years, I’ve been trying to convince myself that Sophie’s cooking and baking wasn’t really as good as I remembered it, but . . .’

‘It is?’

‘It’s better,’ he sighed. ‘If anything, even better than I remembered!’

‘I’m guessing you used to eat at Hope’s place a lot when you were together?’

‘Yeah,’ he replied, ‘all the time and Hope used to come to the farm too, whenever she could get a lift out of the village.’

It was really sad to think that him, Hope and Sam, who had once shared so much, couldn’t now be a part of each other’s lives because of what had happened the night of the crash and because Hope was now in love with Sam. Don’t get me wrong, I did understand how difficult it all was and that it wasn’t a situation you could tie up with a neat bow and hand back fixed, but it was still sad, especially now they were all living in such close proximity again.

‘You know,’ Joe ruefully smiled, ‘the taste of that cake makes me want to go back to the café.’

‘You should go,’ I told him. ‘There’s no reason why you shouldn’t.’

‘No way,’ he said, shaking his head, ‘it’s not worth the hassle. I wouldn’t want Sam to think I was talking to Hope or even trying to see her behind his back.’

‘She’s not in the café half the time,’ I said, ‘because she’s in the pub and, even if she was, I’m sure Sam wouldn’t think that.’

That said, given that I had seen Joe and Hope talking pretty furtively in the lane, he might be justified in jumping to that very conclusion if he also saw them with their heads together like that.

‘No,’ Joe shrugged. ‘I couldn’t do it. I know how it feels to have a mate muscle in on your other half and I wouldn’t want him thinking I was doing anything like that. Even if he has already done it to me.’

I didn’t point out that, if what I knew of the situation and the timings were correct, then Sam had still been in a coma when he and Hope split up and consequently capable of doing very little.

‘That’s something you might want to think about, Tess,’ he then floored me by adding.

‘What?’