She checked the clock: 3:20 a.m., and slumped, now aware of the dampness of her shirt, the pounding combination of fatigue and distress stabbing at her temples. A new dream.

The same old story.

Nightmares, and waking in panicked desperation, were nothing new. She had never been a sound sleeper, but the phenomenon her therapist insisted on calling PTSD had kicked in after she was attacked, nearly a year ago. Thanks to reconstructive surgery, physical traces of the stabbing were now almost undetectable, but the psychological scars endured, disrupting her thoughts whenever she failed to overload herself with work, or some substitute distraction.

In recent months, with the help of Brian Sturridge, she had managed to batter the syndrome into its lowest ebb since the ordeal.

Except her support hadn’t stopped there. Inconvenient as the fact might be, given their current situation, Mike had played a massive part in her recovery, providing professional backing at work, personal reassurance at home. And as she had stabilized, it was understandable that he wanted to move forwards, get on with their lives.

What he didn’t seem to appreciate was that the attack, and its various legacies, weren’t Hawkins’ only impediments to Happy Ever After. The trouble was, not even she knew what those other barriers were.

Mike’s efforts to impose whatever passed as a normal life on them both had created friction that now threatened to drive them not just into separate bedrooms, but apart for good.

To make matters worse, Hawkins hadn’t grasped the indispensability of his presence until it was removed. Her grand plan, to halt their downward trajectory by moving Mike off her team, had only exacerbated the rate of decay, and what she’d envisaged as a more harmonious life together outside of work was quickly turning into a tuneless mess.

She lay still, feeling a cold sweat form on her brow. Trying to stem the tide of frustration and regret; willing her pulse to slow.

It didn’t.

Instead, she found her heart rate rising again, her breaths becoming contracted and snatched. Sturridge had warned her about this.

The early signs of a panic attack.

She almost shouted for Mike, but stopped herself at the last moment. They were hardly in the best place for her to be dragging him out of bed. And for what – to sit and hold her hand till she went back to sleep? Sturridge had insisted several times that if this type of anxiety arose, she should call him before anyone else.

But did that really apply in the middle of the night?

Probably not.

She switched off the light and lay back, staring up at the ceiling’s darkened mass, trying to slow her breathing. But the room seemed to expand around her, its walls retreating. Isolating her.