‘Hello, dear. Nice to see you here. Find everything you needed?’

‘Yes, thank you.’ I smiled.

‘Celebrating anything nice?’ Marge asked as she rang up the champagne I’d picked out. It wasn’t a great brand, but it was the best that the village shop stocked and right now I really wished I’d left it on the shelf. The truth was it was for champagne jellies that Felix and Poppy adored but, having already overheard their conversation, I could only imagine the thoughts now racing through both their heads as to what me buying this bottle of champagne meant.

‘No, not at all. It’s for making champagne jellies with. My family love them.’ I decided to go with the truth, although I had my doubts as to whether they’d believe a word of it.

‘Lovely!’ Marge said as she rang the items through.

I made a show of looking down to get my purse out, but I didn’t miss the brief exchange of looks between the two women as I did so.

They totally didn’t believe me. Well, there was little I could do about it now. Hopefully, by tomorrow, they’d have found something else to gossip about.

It was a few days before I saw Jack, other than briefly. Word had got around that he was back and available for work. I had a feeling that word had got around he was available for other things as well, and that might have been another reason for his absences. It didn’t bother me. In fact, I was quite glad of it. If it was known he was seeing somebody else, the gossips would have less inclination to talk about me and I could go back to my quiet life.

‘You don’t have to leave me food out every time, you know?’ Jack’s deep voice made me jump. I’d been dishing out shepherd’s pie into individual portions, freezing a couple and putting a couple aside to be reheated for dinner time, my mind elsewhere as I turned over a plot dilemma in my head. The spoon clattered to the floor. Jack reached it before I could and moved to the sink to rinse it off before handing it back to me and then quickly cleaning the floor where it had landed.

‘Thanks,’ I said taking it from him and continuing with my task.

‘Did you hear what I said?’ he asked.

‘Are you complaining?’

‘Of course not, the meals are always delicious, but that’s not the point.’

‘What is the point?’ I asked, moving him aside as I finished up and bent to get the labels from the drawer behind him.

‘The point is you don’t have to cook for me. That wasn’t the agreement.’

‘It wasn’t not the agreement, either. And we’ve had this conversation.’

A soft rumble of laughter wafted itself around me. ‘You have an answer for everything. You always did. I wasn’t surprised when I heard your writing had really taken off. You always seem to have the right words.’