Narrative Tenses: Flashback and Foreshadowing (C1)

As Maria sat in the divorce lawyer's waiting room that morning, she thought of the rainy night they ___ engaged on the Ponte Vecchio.

What Tom didn't know that quiet evening in the garage was that within a year, the little side project ___ his entire career.

Walking back through the cobbled village square decades later, she remembered every single shopfront where her grandmother ___ her sweets as a child.

That summer, the family ___ to spend a fortnight in a cottage in Cornwall, but the freak floods cancelled everything at the last minute.

At the funeral on the Thursday, Marcus thought painfully of every pointless argument they ___ in their last few weeks together.

As I reached for the phone on my desk, I realised with a jolt that I ___ to ring my sister at that exact moment.

By the time she joined the firm in 2010, all four of the original founders ___ already.

That short, polite meeting in the corner office in March ___ the turning point in his entire career, though absolutely no one realised it at the time.

At seventy she could still summon the precise smell of the warm bakery on Rue Lepic, where she ___ as a teenager.

They ___ to move to Berlin together in the spring, but his mother's sudden illness changed every single plan they had made.

He kept the small silver locket in his breast pocket at all times because his grandmother ___ it to him on her deathbed years before.

None of them suspected, sitting in that warm café in early February, that within a fortnight half the country ___ in strict lockdown.

Her diary, only found after the funeral, made it heart-wrenchingly clear that, for several years before the diagnosis, she ___ in silence.

He ___ to confess the whole thing when the doorbell rang downstairs, and the rare moment of honesty was utterly lost.

The shy boy with the second-hand violin at the back of the village hall ___ a national orchestra four decades later.