There were probably safer ways to take a breather. But Liza had always been the kind of girl who ran with scissors. “It’s a road, Hanna. A quite well-maintained road that cars can get along just fine. I’m not going to fall off a cliff and die if I walk ten paces.”

To illustrate her point Liza walked ten paces, then ten more. If she was being totally, one thousand percent honest with herself, it was slightly scarier than she’d anticipated. The light from the car’s headlights was swallowed up very quickly, and then there was nothing but the night. And not a normal, sensible night like you got in London, everything bathed in the cool glow of streetlamps and a thousand tiny window-dots spread out below you like the opposite of stars. A bleak, primordial, rural night made of shadows and wind, where a black sky, thick with black clouds, flowed into a black hillside thick with black trees, and when you stopped and listened you could hear things moving that could be far too close or so far away that the whole world seemed like an endless void.

She stopped. She’d gone far enough that she couldn’t see where she was putting her feet, and if she went much further she might genuinely lose sight of the car. And it was cold. She’d have said unseasonably cold, but they were high up, and a depressing fact of British weather was that you were as likely to get snow at Easter as at Christmas.

The sensible thing to do would be to go back. To tell Hanna that she was sorry—well, not sorry exactly, but that she didn’t want to be fighting right at this moment, and that while she still felt that this holiday was borderline non-consensual, she did on some level appreciate the gesture.

Because God knew that one of them had to.

Fuck.

How had they got here? Trying their damnedest not to have a screaming match at eight o’clock on Good Friday while navigating their way down narrow, blustery roads to a luxury hotel in a mobile phone blackspot. Hadn’t they done everything right? It wasn’t like they’d rushed into marriage—they’d been dating for years, and even when it was suddenly legalised and half their friends were getting high on equality, they’d waited. They’d taken it slow, and lived together first, and had all the big, serious conversations about life goals, and values, and whether they wanted children, and whose parents they’d spend Christmas with.