She’d come clean to Paul within days, once Mike had explained he was taking the secondment the force was begging him to consider, and convinced Hawkins to give her existing relationship the last chance it deserved. Mike disappeared to Manchester.

Paul moved out three weeks later.

Yet it had been a further six months before she and Mike had spoken again, thrust back together on the biggest case of Hawkins’ career, and her first as acting DCI. The investigation had literally almost killed them both, but in doing so, brought them closer than ever.

Since then, they’d weathered nearly twelve months of cohabitation, including Hawkins’ rehabilitation from life-threatening injuries, extended visits from her father and sister, the latter including the house-destroying handful that was her nephew and niece. They’d survived everything apparently sent to test their relationship.

Except themselves.

She was volatile and impulsive; he was methodical and pragmatic. They made a natural team, Hawkins yanking at every leash while Mike provided just enough guidance to make sure she pulled at the right one. There were clashes, obviously, but every partnership had those.

In recent months, unsolicited barriers had lifted one by one to leave them unimpeded. Now things were getting very real, very fast, and the nearer Hawkins felt herself being dragged towards normality, the more she couldn’t help but resist. Mike was all for the marriage they were supposed to be planning for the following year, but all that had happened so far was that, as Hawkins’ natural resistance to convention became increasingly challenged, so strengthened her urge to abort. The thought of true domestication – family-size shopping trolleys full of wet wipes, daytime television and people carriers – terrified her. She hadn’t said as much, but Mike wasn’t stupid.

He knew.

She cared about him, easily enough to spend the rest of their lives together, yet that wasn’t the issue. Which meant she had to face the possibility that the impediment was something innate, something in her, dormant in the early stages of their reunion, only to be set in full destructive motion by the increasingly real prospect of having to participate in a genuine, till-death-do-us-part, adult relationship. She had been here before, of course, with Paul, but when the big question surfaced there, she’d ended up going behind his back. With Mike.

At the time, Hawkins had convinced herself that what was right wasn’t always painless. She had bailed out of one serious relationship, promising herself that an increasingly uncomfortable situation mustn’t be allowed to curtail the prospect of true happiness.

She cared more for Mike than she had done for Paul, that much was clear in hindsight, and she would never cheat on him, but remaining similarities were ominously pronounced. Was Mike’s observation correct?

That the cycle was simply repeating itself.