Sometimes Daniel joined us, spooning mushed up carrot into Hope while making the odd suggestion or reeling us back in to reality when our ideas started straying beyond innovative and into downright silly.

I tried to pretend I didn’t love those meetings best of all, but it was growing increasingly difficult. I knew this, because I was also struggling to remember why my growing feelings for Daniel were such a bad idea. He was a good guy. He was honest and forthright, the complete opposite of Marcus. A perfect example of the kind of person I was trying to become. He was a heart-squeezingly devoted dad. We laughed at the same things, were able to talk for ages or, more often, not bother talking at all. Most importantly, I felt completely comfortable with him – apart from those times he looked at me a second too long, or stood beside me to peer into the pan I was stirring, and I caught a whiff of his scent, and shivers ran up my spine that were far from comfortable.

I was rapidly starting to want to know everything about this man. I loved every second spent discovering who he was, who he had been – and, in the spirit of the lifestyle regeneration retreat, who he wanted to be. But the deeper we went, the more I wanted him to like me, the more important it became to keep the colossal shadow in my past hidden. Because the more I knew him, the more I knew that he wouldn’t like what he found there. I was stuck, and it was distinctly uncomfortable.

I also suspected that at times he could sense that I was keeping something from him. Only, unlike Becky and Alice, he was patient, and gentle about it. At a loss of what else to do, I decided to simply enjoy his patience and his gentleness for as long as he’d let me.

17

One of the most important changes we needed to address was the bathrooms. Daniel had agreed that he would move into Charlie’s room once we’d found the courage to sort through all her things and then redecorate. The storage space next to it could be adapted into a bedroom for Hope at some point, too. We spent a good while going over our options for the first floor, eventually agreeing to see if it was possible to convert the box room into a bathroom that could then have interconnecting doors to the two smaller bedrooms. It wasn’t ideal, but as Becky kept reminding me, this was a retreat house, not a hotel or even a B & B, and we wouldn’t be charging anything close to £2,000.

That gave us four bedrooms, with space for up to eight guests. If we managed to make a success of it (‘What do you mean, “if”?’ Becky retorted), then there were a couple of falling down outbuildings that were begging for a renovation. One thing at a time, however, as Daniel kept reminding us. Or, to be more realistic, about 300 things at any one time.