Her hand trailed back and forth in the freezing wet grass, finding nothing until she dug out her mobile and activated the torch, blinking as the bright LED split the dark. She retrieved her keys and fought with the lock before stepping inside, easing the door closed as quietly as possible. Her next conversation with Mike would be hard enough, without first having to explain why she’d woken him at three in the morning.

She stood in the hallway, picking out the quiet hum of the boiler, the clunk of water in the pipes, but otherwise the house was eerily still. She shrugged off her coat, hung it beside the door and walked through the living room into the kitchen, using the remnants of her phone battery to locate a glass and fill it from the tap.

Admiral Kirk was curled up on a newspaper Mike must have left on the table, and he glanced up as she entered the room, settling again when he realized she wasn’t going to shoo him. His lardy posterior’s noisy rattling of the cat flap was deterrent enough.

Hawkins trailed a hand along his side as she left the room and went upstairs. She used the bathroom, stripped to her underwear and trudged across the landing with a pile of clothes clamped between glass of water and phone, hoping he wouldn’t have retreated to the spare bedroom again. She slowed when she neared the bedroom, carefully easing the handle down and opening the door just enough to listen for Mike’s breathing.

Silence.

‘Sorry,’ she whispered, tiptoeing inside, managing to stub her toe on the bed, suppressing a pained screech as she steadied herself on the corner of the mattress, before resuming her slow shuffle towards long overdue comfort.

She plugged in her phone, dug her nightshirt out from under the pillow and changed as quietly as possible, before slipping between the cold sheets. Still no sound.

She lay still for a moment, pulling the duvet in tight so her body heat had less of a cavity to fill. Her hand snaked into no man’s land, hoping to find his arm.

He wasn’t there.

Hawkins rolled on to her back and stared up into the blackness, thinking about Mike. They were both fiery characters, so of course they had always clashed now and again. But this didn’t feel like just another argument in months of instability. It felt more like an ending.

She sat up as irritation nagged at her, ignoring the bright red numbers on her alarm clock.

She had crawled in at three a.m., exhausted, desperate for sleep. Yet her first thought had been to reconcile their latest fight; to prevent the wedge of negativity driving itself deeper still, by leaving another argument unresolved. Except her supposed fiancé had already faced that dilemma. She pictured him on the landing hours earlier, staring at the bedroom door.

Turning away, again.