Lydia and Sam spoke about their future (Picture: ITV)

It’s painful to watch one of Emmerdale’s most popular couples, Sam (James Hooton) and Lydia (Karen Blick), enduring such a hard time and not being able to be together.

Lydia’s world was turned upside down when she was raped by her former friend Craig (Ben Addis). She recently told Kim (Claire King) that her feelings about the rape have been complicated by her shared history with Craig. As the father of her baby Toby, who died, there’s part of Lydia that can’t hate Craig although she loathes him for what he did.

She told Kim that there was no way she could explain her feelings to Sam when she couldn’t make sense of it herself.

She and Sam were just about holding on together but then she discovered that before Craig was found dead Sam had savagely beaten him up. She’d begged him not to take things into his own hands and felt he’d made everything worse.

She’s been staying at Home Farm while she tries to work through how she’s feeling and in Tuesday (November 21)’s episode she was helping Dawn (Olivia Bromley) to assemble some flat-pack furniture for the new nursery.

Dawn talked about her difficult past as a drug addict and said she was glad all that was behind her and it was possible to move on from traumatic events.

Craig was killed by Ice, Kim’s horse (Picture: ITV)

So when we saw Lydia back at the Dingles’ later on, it looked like Dawn’s words might have made her think it was time to go back to her family. That’s what Sam thought, too, when he came home and found her tidying up like she always does.

She was rearranging some flowers in a vase and went to throw one away because the stem was broken.

‘Still bonny, though,’ Sam said and we knew he was talking about his wife, or their relationship, as well as the flower. ‘Can’t throw away summat that lovely.’

It’s about as poetical as Sam Dingle gets, and he followed up by apologising for what he did to Craig, saying he was angry and he wasn’t thinking about Lydia like he should have.

He said he’s done a bad thing and wanted to make it up to her and be the person she needs.

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Lydia might have been slightly swayed by all this but she said she still wasn’t ready. She repeated that she needed to get through it on her own and was determined to do that, no matter how long it takes.

Then she left – and Sam sank to the kitchen floor, sobbing.

Is there any hope for Lydia and Sam’s relationship?

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Can they finally move forward?