How was it possible that this had all got so far and no one in the village knew about it? Surely there should have been some sort of public consultation by now? Hope and I might have figured out that Joe and Sam were holding something back, but it obviously wasn’t the same thing after all and to think I’d been sucked in by Joe’s suggestions that he still felt a connection to Home Farm, when in reality he wanted to be free of it. No wonder Charlie was so against his ideas and shut his suggestions down! Clearly the youngest Upton brother was still a rebel, and now he’d found himself a very lucrative cause.

‘Do you want tea, Tess?’ he called from the kitchen, making my heart leap into my mouth.

I had been so absorbed in the paperwork I hadn’t heard him end the call.

‘Yes, please,’ I swallowed, hastily rearranging the pile with a magazine on top, ‘that would be great.’

Now I was harbouring two bits of bad news for Hope. Not only had I kissed her boyfriend, but her ex was set to change the face of the landscape that she, and everyone else living in Wynmouth, loved so much. Joe might have told me that his being back in the area was difficult, and that driving by the crash site was painful, but obliterating it all – because having seen Sunny Shores handiwork I knew that’s what would happen – was extreme. Was he really that desperate?

‘How’d you sleep?’ he asked as he appeared in the doorway with mussed-up hair and a tray holding mugs of tea and slightly overdone toast.

‘Badly,’ I said, sitting back down again. ‘But given how long the storm raged and how early Charlie got up, that was only to be expected.’

I felt a whole jumbled-up mix of emotions as I watched him arrange the tray. I was still frustrated that he couldn’t remember me from former holidays and desperate to find out why he and Sam had swapped places when it came to my first kiss, but I couldn’t ask because then they’d know I had lied about visiting before. And now, as if that wasn’t enough to contend with, my head was full of the farm situation too.

I knew the finances needed fixing, but to go to such lengths, for Joe to turn up and set about selling off everything his father had worked to create, especially when he had presented it to me so proudly yesterday, just didn’t make sense.

‘It hung around for a while, didn’t it?’ he said. ‘You often find that here. Bad weather can hug the coast for hours.’

I wondered if the Sunny Shores team had factored that into their plans.