I spent most of that day cleaning the rest of the kitchen. Okay, that’s not quite true. I spent some of the day cleaning and sorting. The rest I spent stressing out, worrying, lolling on the sofa daydreaming, obsessively checking my phone in case I’d missed a call from Lucy, snoozing, grieving and ordering myself to go back to the kitchen and do some more cleaning.

It was a busy day. I virtually fell asleep face-first in the pie I’d cooked for dinner. Daniel, if anything, looked more tired than I felt.

‘The kitchen looks amazing,’ he said, once Hope had been picked up from Billie’s and tucked into her cot for the night. I had to agree with him, but it was ninety percent down to the gorgeous farmhouse kitchen, and only ten percent down to me having cleaned and polished and tidied the whole thing, including some finishing touches like lining up a row of pretty, mismatched jugs and vases on the high shelf running along one wall. I’d also removed the grubby blinds from the two large windows – what was the point of having blinds when the view was nothing but an overgrown lawn and the fields and woods beyond? I’d taken the piles of random papers, tools, packets of lightbulbs and batteries and other unsightly mess crammed on the dresser and stuffed it into the cupboards instead, taking out the beautiful set of crockery, dusting it down so that the daisy pattern shone, and displaying it on the dresser shelves. Having cleaned the rest of the room, it now looked like a kitchen rather than a disused garage.

‘And this tastes amazing!’ Daniel added, nodding his approval. ‘Where did you get the pie from?’

‘I made it,’ I admitted, somewhat abashed. I was a food critic who had grown up in a B & B. I knew how to cook, even if I’d hardly needed to bother in recent years. ‘I found some frozen meat in the freezer, chucked in some floppy vegetables lurking in the pantry, not much else to it.’

We ate in silence for a while, me too weary to bother talking, Daniel apparently lost in thought.

‘Your parents ran a hotel or something, didn’t they?’

‘A B & B. The Tufted Duck. In the Lake District.’

‘I remember Charlie worked there for a while. She loved it. Said out of all the hundreds of places she’d worked, it was her favourite. She said it was more than a home from home, because homes can be hard work, and this place was a sanctuary, somewhere she could just be.’

‘Well, that might explain why my parents kept having to fire her, then.’ I laughed, even as my throat had swollen with the beautiful words. For me, the Tufted Duck had meant never-ending hard work, and being bossed about, and feeling like a perpetual child. But I could see how for Charlie, whose life was an exhausting torrent of chaos, the decades-old routines and simple, straightforward order to how we did things would have offered her some peace.