At 28, my world turned upside down when the man I envisioned spending forever with abruptly ended our relationship. I had eagerly driven to visit him for the weekend, only to be stopped at the threshold. Without stepping inside, he told me it was over and asked me to leave.

The shock left me speechless, unable to muster any questions or reactions that made sense at the time.

For years, I was haunted by that moment, replaying it endlessly in my mind. I became convinced that his decisive departure was a reflection of some flaw within me.

Seventeen years passed before I finally uncovered the real reason behind his sudden decision. The truth, when it finally came to light, was nearly as heart-wrenching as the breakup itself.

The man I had never stopped loving hadn’t left because he no longer cared for me. The breakup had nothing to do with any fault of mine.

Instead, it was because he believed a lie about me told to him by someone he trusted – his mother – a woman I’d always really liked, who I thought would one day be my mother-in-law.

One lie destroyed the future we’d planned and, while fate would eventually reunite us, we lost nearly two decades of what would tragically prove to be all too precious time.

Nick and I first met when I was working as a model in my early 20s, having been signed by an agency near my home in Kent aged 16.

I loved it and one of my most memorable jobs was working on karaoke roadshows. A brewery had imported two machines from Japan and we toured the South-East, attempting to introduce this new entertainment concept to British drinkers. Pubs were turned into mini concert venues with DJs and roadies, and models like me were hired to encourage shy locals onto the stage. It was huge fun.

It was on one of those roadshows that I met Nick Gray in 1990. I walked into a pub and noticed a roadie smiling so broadly that I instinctively turned around, convinced he knew someone standing behind me.

But there was no one. He was smiling at me. Nick was famous for that smile – warm, open and instantly disarming – and he later told me he fell for me the moment he saw me. However, at the time I was seeing a racing driver called Piers, so there was no chance of me reciprocating.

Over the next couple of years, we worked together on different roadshows and, although everyone knew Nick had a soft spot for me, he was unfailingly respectful.

Then, at 24, I quit modelling. I’d saved money and wanted to pursue another passion – food – opening a cafe in Tunbridge Wells.

It was hard work and about 18 months later my relationship with Piers ended. Through a mutual friend, Nick discovered I was single so one day he walked into my cafe holding a bunch of flowers.

I hadn’t seen him for two years so the shock nearly made me drop everything. He smiled, told me he’d heard I was single, and finally asked me out. From then on, everything felt effortless. We laughed constantly, shared the same values and instinctively understood one another. Everyone around us assumed we’d get married – and I did, too.

Most weekends, I would visit him in Horsham, West Sussex, at his parents’ farm, where he was doing up a property for us to live in.

I adored his parents, Annie and Freddy. Annie and I spent lots of time together and I truly believed we were great friends.

For two years Nick and I were ­blissfully happy. He supported me wholeheartedly when I sold my cafe to train as a fashion designer and we were on the same page about a very important subject: neither of us wanted children.

Both of us had known this from a young age. My mum says I first announced I wasn’t having children when I was just five – and I never changed my mind.

Then, in 1996, everything ended without warning.

One weekend in late summer, I arrived at the farm to be greeted by Nick looking so pale and distraught I thought someone had died. But his first words were: ‘It’s over.’ I thought he was referring to the property renovation, then he said: ‘No, we’re over, I don’t want to ever see you again.’

He handed me a bag of my clothes and shut the door in my face.

There was no explanation and no opportunity to fight for what we had. I drove home in tears, barely understanding what had happened.

When I got home, Annie rang me, confused and upset, asking why I’d left Nick. All she could get out of him was: ‘Caroline and I have finished.’

When I told her I hadn’t initiated the break-up, she insisted he would never finish with me.

But when I told her he really had ended things, there was a pause, then she said ‘oh’ and that was the end of the conversation. I never spoke to her again.

I spent the following weeks ­devastated and bewildered. Nobody else understood what had happened, either. Some of his friends asked me if I wanted them to talk some sense into him but I knew he could be stubborn and pushing him could be counter-productive.

The truth is I still expected him to walk in at any moment and we’d be able to sort everything out.

After a few weeks it sunk in he wasn’t coming back. Yet how could a man who just months earlier told me he was going to marry me excise me from his life so brutally?

Still, time went on, and over the following years I was able to pick up the threads of my life – but something inside me never fully healed.

After completing my fashion training I entered an unhappy relationship for 11 years. When that ended, I worked as a photographer, then a town councillor.

Then, on my 45th birthday in 2013 – 17 years after our last meeting – I received a card from Nick.

Inside was a David Bowie CD and a heartfelt letter apologising for how badly he’d treated me, saying I was the last person who deserved that pain. I cried for hours, overwhelmed by emotions I thought I’d buried long ago.

While there was no phone number, his address was on the back, so I wrote to thank him and included my number, if he wanted to get in ­contact. Nick texted two days later, the moment he got it, ­saying he hadn’t expected to hear from me but it was great to be in touch.

When I said I still needed to know what happened all those years ago, he wrote me a heartfelt four-page letter.

In it, he explained his mother had been dropping increasingly strong hints to him that I was changing my mind about having kids. This was just non-negotiable for him, so he thought it was best to make a quick and definitive break, something he had since regretted.

He also admitted he had never stopped thinking about me. When he realised it was my 45th birthday he decided he had to apologise, even if I never responded.

I froze as I read the letter. It simply wasn’t true what his mum had said. I’d never said I had changed my mind about having children to anyone, because my views never wavered.

Having read the letter I texted him straight away saying I needed to talk, so that night he called. When I answered, I said: ‘You do know you’ve wasted nearly 18 years of our lives?’ – to which he replied: ‘I know!’

He sounded identical, with that deep husky voice – I just melted.

That call lasted for three hours, going over the letter and what had happened in our lives since; he’d had a few serious relationships but they’d never seemed quite right.

When I asked him why he hadn’t just spoken to me at the time, he said: ‘She was my mum. Why wouldn’t I believe her?’ I understood that, I really did. We talked endlessly about why his mother had done it. Did she secretly hate me, or was it because she wanted him to find another woman who might want children?

Sadly, neither of Nick’s parents were alive by this point, so we could only surmise what had ­happened. He said Annie was very fond of me. She knew our feelings on the matter of children but she desperately wanted to be a grandmother, so his theory was she’d tried to engineer a way to get us to come round to the idea.

She thought if Nick believed I was changing my mind, he’d change his because he loved me so much.

She meant well. She simply didn’t understand how strongly we both felt about the subject.

Even after we broke up, she never confessed. Maybe she hoped Nick would meet someone else and have children – he never did – or perhaps she couldn’t bear to admit the damage she’d caused. I truly don’t believe it was done out of spite, rather a tragic miscalculation by a woman who came from a generation where the natural order was to meet, marry and have babies.

Ultimately, while I regretted what had happened, I wasn’t angry with her and am just sad she didn’t live to see Nick and I reunited. Once Nick and I had reconnected there was never any doubt we’d be together again.

We were older and wiser but the chemistry was still there and we slipped easily back into our old relationship.

On April 18, 2015, exactly two years since we’d met up again, we got married, aged 49 and 47.

I left Kent to join him in ­Wareham, Dorset. Together we built a life that felt both peaceful and exhilarating.

Now working as a handyman, Nick was the most active, sporty, joyful man. But life’s kindness can be frightening in its brevity.

On December 8, 2023, out of the blue Nick started to cough up blood. Five days later he was admitted to hospital with pneumonia. The consultant said that because all the usual tests came back negative, it was likely to have been caused by vape-­related damage. Ironically, Nick had given up ­cigarettes just before we got ­married, swapping them for vapes because I worried smoking would damage his health.

After a spell in ICU, he was allowed home for Christmas, but on December 28 he went downhill and was readmitted.

The following evening Nick called me from the hospital saying he couldn’t breathe and that he wasn’t going to make it.

I drove straight there, where he was surrounded by an army of medics. But there was nothing they could do. I held his hand as he passed away in the early hours of the 30th. He was just 57.

It was all so fast and what ­followed was a grief so vast it felt impossible to navigate.

The lost years took on an extra poignancy. We should have been married for nearly 30 years, not just eight.

Grief forced me to redefine myself again. I went back to studying, this time retraining as a nutritional coach and cooking skills teacher and, to my surprise, I also returned to modelling.

Last year, at 57, I entered Ms Great Britain Kent Classic, for women 45 and over.

This year, I’m doing it again on June 21 – what would have been Nick’s 60th birthday – and my platform is to highlight the dangers of vaping, which I believe contributed to his death.

Today, I live in Dorset with my cats, Pins and Needles, and my memories of Nick.

Our story didn’t end the way I imagined it would but it was real, joyful and ours. And even now, with all the heartbreak it holds, I still believe it was a fairy tale – just one with a very human ending.

As told to Matthew Barbour