‘Yes, that’s settled and maybe we can plan something nice to do when I get back to celebrate the New Year and new beginnings?’ Liv said cheerfully. They’d have to do something, a meal out together or perhaps a family day out, around her father’s hospital appointment, but no-one was going to mention that now.

*

After all that, there wasn’t much to pack for going back to work. Liv decided she’d leave most of her clothes in Ballycove, since she’d be down again in a week or two and anyway, she’d have enough to sort out when she got back to the flat with trying to clear out Eddie’s belongings. In the end, her bag had little more than books, make-up, a huge chunk of Christmas cake and a few jars of home-made jam and chutney from her mother’s store cupboard.

Liv decided on a walk later that afternoon and with the three dogs racing ahead of her, she felt a lot more relaxed than she really expected to. The sun was heavy and unusually bright in the cloudless sky, which she knew boded well in terms of seeing the snow off, but she wasn’t sure that it wouldn’t mean a hard frost later if the weather forecast was to be believed. There was nowhere quite like Ballycove and Liv knew she was lucky to be able to come back here and lick her wounds. Even though Eddie lived here, they’d never run into each other, quite simply because they were such completely different people. Eddie would never come for a walk along the beach, unless there was something in it for him. His natural habitat was the pub or his mother’s house and Barbara Quirke’s house was a place that Liv knew she’d never go anywhere near again. And that was a relief, because now, with even this tiny distance from the pair of them, she could admit she’d never really liked the woman, no matter how hard she’d tried to convince herself otherwise.

It was funny, but out here, with the wind gathering up the waves into a white foam in the distance, she wondered if she even liked Eddie all that much – not now, obviously, but when they were together. Hadn’t she spent much of their time together covering over the cracks of things that irritated her about him? She had made excuses, not just to Maya and her parents, but even to herself. She’d been so focused on filling the gaping hole in her life that Rachel had left after she died; she hadn’t stopped to look at what she was replacing her twin sister with.