It was lovely to be back at the farm again, she had a few more days before she was due back on shift at the hospital and it had been far too long since she’d been home last time. It seemed that there was always something to be done on her days off recently. Between helping Eddie with the workshop and then trying to keep the flat tidy, the fridge filled and the dishwasher emptied, she hadn’t been home in months.

Liv pulled out the book Maya had pressed into her hands earlier. She was looking forward to this. There was nothing like the silence of the farm to really relax with and enjoy a good book. She’d just snuggled beneath the quilt when her mobile rang. Eddie, or at least, that was who she assumed was calling her, until she looked at the caller display.

*

‘I just wanted to let you know that I’m back in Dublin, I thought it would be good to get back to normal and I had things to tie up, before the New Year,’ Pete said when he called her that evening. Usually, he texted, so she had a feeling that maybe he just needed to talk. Had he come back earlier for her? In her hour of need? It’d be typical Pete, always thinking of everyone else.

‘Well, if you’re not doing anything I’ve got some curry dinners in the freezer?’

‘That sounds like a plan.’

A few hours later, he arrived with beer and brought the freezing cold night air into the cosy flat with him.

‘So?’ Liv asked as she popped his plate into the microwave for a final blast. She’d made the curries just a week before Christmas, thinking at the time that it would be good to have something easily to hand when she and Eddie got back from Ballycove after the Christmas break. It seemed like a million years ago, as if that had been someone else’s life she’d been living by mistake.

‘So, yourself,’ he said taking the top off a bottle of beer and handing it to her. She understood; of course she did. He didn’t want to be fussed over, having people looking at him as if there was something wrong with him, waiting for him to break down because things were finished with Anya. It must be a relief to be back in Dublin. He just wanted to chill out and shoot the breeze.

They sat companionably on the old sofa watching one of those movies that turns up every Christmas, and they ate their chicken curries in comfortable silence.

‘I like what you’ve done with the place,’ he said in the ad break.

‘What, emptied out half the crap that I hadn’t even realised was here?’ It was true; the flat felt bigger, more hers somehow now that all of Eddie’s belongings had been removed.