Nicola Bulley made plans for the future night before she vanished

She was last seen at around 9.20am while walking her dog alongside the River Wyre in St Michael’s on Wyre not long after taking her daughters, aged six and nine, to school.

The mum-of-two and her younger sister had been planning a spa break and she bought tickets to watch her children perform and choir and gymnastic shows in recent weeks.

Nicola’s parents, Ernest and Dot Bulley, have shared their ‘dread’ at the thought of never seeing her again and of their grandchildren ‘sobbing their hearts out’ after being told ‘mummy is lost’.

Nicola’s dad Ernest, 73, told the Mirror: “We will never stop looking. We just dread to think we will never see her again, if the worst came to the worst and she was never found, how will we deal with that for the rest of our lives?”

Mum, Dot, 72, shared: “Our worst time is when it gets dark. We find it really hard to think about wondering 'is she ok' and 'where is she?'.

“But [the police] tell us 24 hours a day they are on it and still working. You wake in the night and you can't get back off to sleep.”

The devastated parents recalled their last conversation before Nicola went missing. Her dad shared that his daughter had no health problems and was enjoying her job.

Ernest said that his daughter was in a good place mentally. “Her mind was great, we picked the children up the Thursday before she went missing, as we do every Thursday," he said.

"We took them home, Nicola had had a meeting with her boss in Garstang and she said can you stay a bit later because I have an important client coming in on Zoom. We said no problem and stayed. She had done her work and she was very upbeat about getting her mortgage sorted.

"I said we better go now and Nicola came to the front door, and I gave her a kiss and told her I loved her and that was the last conversation I had with her."

Anybody with information can call 101, quoting log 473 of January 27, or Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111.