‘Never mind, we’ll just get on with it, shall we?’ Liv asked, although she knew that the chance of getting out of here before midnight was now slim or nil. Any feelings of either guilt or being somehow hard done by were quickly forgotten. The A&E was as busy as she’d ever seen it and there was hardly time to catch her breath between coming on shift and having a late lunch break that afternoon. The good news was that Francine had managed to secure six agency staff to come on for the night shift, so even if the worst came to the worst, there would at least be enough nurses to help out.

When Liv sat down to eat her lunch, the pain in her hip had travelled, not just down her leg as she’d suspected, but right up and into her back. She took two more painkillers with her coffee and determined that she would not be a complete ninny and complain, but rather, she would just get on with it and hope it would run its course before the end of the day. She imagined there would be a fair bit of bruising, but hey – it wasn’t as if anyone was going to be seeing her in her underwear any time soon, right?

She pulled out her phone to call Pete just before she was due back on shift. She imagined he’d either be shooting the breeze in his apartment or maybe at work, tidying up any loose ends before the year was over.

‘Hi.’ The voice on the other end purred when it was answered. Anya.

Without thinking, Liv put the phone down immediately, crashing it against the table as if it had burned her badly. What on earth was Anya doing answering Pete’s phone?

What indeed? Of course, Liv wasn’t entirely stupid. Pete might have come over to her flat yesterday while she was at work and filled her fridge and left a new lock for the front door but he’d been gathering up all Anya’s belongings too. How stupid was she? She’d assumed he was tidying them up so they could put both Eddie and Anya out of their lives, pack them up in black plastic bags and haul them to the workshop and they could all live happily ever after – isn’t that what she really thought? But she had been completely wrong. Stupid, stupid Liv. She cursed her own stupidity now. Of course Pete had come over to take all of Anya’s stuff back to his own apartment. That was why he’d folded everything up so meticulously. He wasn’t packing her stuff up so he could dump it somewhere else; he was packing her up because she was moving back in with him. God, how had she managed to worm her way back in with him?