It sounded like they’d had the perfect date. Lunch and shopping in a pretty market town, combined with a bit of business. It was exactly what Maya had hoped for, and exactly what I’d gone out of my way to enable, I quickly reminded myself.

‘Yay,’ said Maya as she bounced in sporting a healthy glow and not at all out of breath as I would have been. ‘You found it. Do you like it?’

‘No,’ I told her, picking it up again. ‘I don’t like it, I love it. It’s beautiful Maya. Thank you so much. It was very thoughtful of you.’

‘I thought it might come in handy for making notes about running Wynter’s, while you’re getting into the swing of things,’ she explained. ‘And Ned mentioned you were planning a holiday, so I thought you might want to record the details of that too. What with you being such a talented artist, I know you’ll make it beautiful.’

‘It already is,’ I acknowledged, ‘but I’ll definitely add to it.’

I wasn’t sure how I felt about her and Ned discussing me. He obviously thought it was acceptable to mention my plans for a couple of weeks away but, and I guessed this from Maya’s buoyant mood and comment about Wynter’s, he clearly hadn’t shared my big life plan. I didn’t know whether I should have felt grateful about that or not.

‘I should have saved it for Christmas really,’ Maya laughed, ‘but I’ve never been any good at keeping secrets. Just don’t go anywhere too wonderful on this getaway of yours,’ she jokingly added, ‘because you might not want to come back.’

‘Right,’ said Ned, ‘we’d better get on. Maya, you take the bathroom upstairs and I’ll use the shower down here.’

‘Not upstairs with me?’ she giggled as she skipped over to the stairs.

‘Not today,’ said Ned, striding off without a backwards glance.

Just as Ned predicted, the footfall at Wynter’s Trees reached record breaking numbers that weekend. It seemed as if the world and his wife were determined to buy their tree, or have it delivered, and decorate it between the eleventh and twelfth of December.

The damp weather on Saturday didn’t impact on customer numbers at all, and everyone was rushed off their feet. Ned hadn’t assigned me anything specific when he doled out the jobs, but as soon as he set off, first with Maya and later Liam, to deliver trees, David set me properly to work.

Once the car park had finally emptied and the beach huts were closed that evening, David gathered everyone together in the barn to ask how their day had gone.