Once they’d reached her home to find Mildred peering through the curtains and beckoning them in. She’d looked Jake up and down thoughtfully, and when he’d left, said to her daughter,

‘Watch out for him. You’re becoming a pretty girl.’

She didn’t know how to say that Jake had never so much as kissed her, but two weeks later, on her eighteenth birthday he finally did so, taking her into seventh heaven.

‘I was waiting for you to be old enough,’ he said.

Life was brilliant then. Mildred, evidently feeling she’d done her motherly duty, was out more than she was in, and Kelly was free to indulge her happiness.

Then Jake had lost his job.

‘I had to fire him,’ Harry explained when Kelly buttonholed him. ‘He’s a hard worker, I admit, but by golly he’s an opinionated young devil.’

‘A good journalist needs opinions,’ Kelly protested, parroting Jake. ‘And he shouldn’t be afraid to stand by them.’

‘Standing by them is one thing. Riding roughshod over everyone is another. There was this assignment, an important one-I told him how it should be handled, and he just went his own way, wouldn’t take advice. I had to be away for a day and when I came back the paper was nearly to bed. If it had gone in like that it would have offended our biggest advertiser-’

‘Advertisers!’ Kelly said scornfully.

‘That’s him talking,’ Harry said. ‘He’s brash, thoughtless, and he’s got more mouth than sense.’

And it was true, Kelly thought now, standing in her kitchen eight years later. Brash, opinionated, cocky, insufferable. When he got in front of a camera it all turned to gold, but we couldn’t have known that then. And I knew him when he wasn’t like that…