‘Why don’t I come and work with you for a while?’ she suggested to him one evening, while he was poring over the accounts with a grim look on his face. ‘I can help you with admin, answering the phones, booking in jobs, invoicing, that sort of thing. I could even do a bit of publicity. It’ll save you having to pay someone.’

Alan had looked up at her in surprise. ‘Are you sure, love? I mean, I could really use the unpaid labour but what about your work?’

‘Things are slow with work anyway. I can still pick up the odd job here and there and then when the business gets back on its feet, I’ll build up my own clients again.’

He’d looked at her with such relief and she could see the emotion in his eyes. ‘Thanks, Soph, you have no idea what this means to me.’

‘We’re a team,’ she told him. ‘Stronger together, remember?’

They’d always been a team, ever since they first got together twelve years ago. Before Alan, Sophie had been stuck in a pattern of dating commitment-phobic men and it always ended badly.

‘It’s because you’ve got horrendous taste in men,’ her friends would tell her over tearful debriefs. ‘You always go for the bad ones.’

Sophie knew they were right but she couldn’t seem to break the pattern. Then one evening, on a night out for someone’s twenty-fifth birthday, she bumped into Alan while queueing for drinks at a bar. He grinned at her and she looked away self-consciously before curiosity got the better of her and she met his eye again. He was fairly handsome in his own way. Tall and broad with sandy hair, a lived-in face and extensive laughter lines, he seemed relaxed in his own skin. They chatted briefly before she was dragged off by her friends to the next bar, but he asked for her number and the next day he called and invited her out for a drink.

It was that simple. She couldn’t believe it. Where was the game-playing? The angst? The staring at her phone willing someone to text her? There was none of that with Alan. From the very beginning he was a true gentleman, and he made it crystal clear that he had no intention of messing a woman around and that he wanted to settle down and have a couple of children. He was such a contrast to the men she normally went out with that she nearly dumped him several times. It all just seemed a bit too easy and part of her still craved the fireworks. But as she got to know him, she fell in love with his warmth, honesty and kindness. He loved her and he would do absolutely anything for her, and in time, she realised that he was the one.

Ten years of marriage and two kids later, she hadn’t regretted her decision once and if anything, she loved him even more now. And that’s why she’d known that she had to do this thing for him. She had started working for him the next day and she stayed on for a year, by which time the economy had improved and business was coming in again.