Somewhere off in the hotel a door opened and closed, and Liza tried to ignore it. “No. But I want to think about something that isn’t murder.”

“Same.”

So for a while, they did. In a room with shuttered windows and a barricaded door, they built themselves a tiny island of calm out of fingertips and memories. A quiet place to re-learn ten years of coming together and parting and fighting and loving and forgetting. And as Liza undid the buttons of Hanna’s black shirt that was identical to every other black shirt that she owned; and as Hanna slipped off Liza’s jeans and looked up for just a fraction of a second with wonder in her eyes—the same wonder that was always in her eyes—there was a moment when they were everybody they had ever been. When they kissed it was their wedding day again; their first date again; the night they hadn’t quite met and Liza had gone home telling herself she’d missed out on something incredible.

Somewhere in the darkness, birds were calling. Somewhere in the hotel, a floorboard creaked, and the timbers whispered with the weather. Somewhere in Liza’s mind fragments of facts and scraps of observations were catching together like burdock seeds and forming a conclusion that she couldn’t quite see. But she didn’t care. What was, was, and what would be, would be, and there and then she was alone in the night with the woman she had loved for a decade, and nothing else mattered.

“You are still,” Hanna whispered, as the row of kisses she had been running up Liza’s body brought her lips close to her ear, “the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.”

“And you”—Liza turned, her face so close to her wife’s that their lips brushed as she spoke—”still take my breath away.”

Hanna’s fingernails dug into Liza’s flanks as she drew her closer. “I’m sorry I stopped for a while.”

“I’m sorry I stopped too.”

There were, Liza decided, different kinds of silence. There was the kind that had settled over their marriage in the last couple of years—a carbon monoxide silence that stifled and killed without a whisper or a trace. Then there was the kind of silence that fell on the hotel every time they found a new body—tense and bloody and ready at any moment to erupt into screaming. Neither were silences she was keen to revisit. And then there was this—the intimate silence of lovers in the dark. A place where the words had all been spoken and there was nothing left but breath and heartbeats and skin on skin on skin.