In fairness, Liv never really tried. She had enough to be ironing with her own uniform and a million other things to be doing. Secretly, she knew, she might have ironed all his clothes, but he put down the impossible standard of his mother’s creases too long ago for her to ever decide to scale that particular barrier with Barbara. Pick your battles, isn’t that what they say? And it was much too easy to fall out with Barbara Quirke without actually looking for reasons to. At this point, Eddie’s mother had fallen out with half the village and she wasn’t a woman to bury the hatchet unless it was squarely in her rival’s shoulder blades.

Even the rector in the local Church of Ireland had fallen foul of Barbara when she overlooked the Quirke roses in favour of the slightly brighter, larger flowers two houses down the road. The annual festival of flowers was, apparently, still a marker by which some of the local competitive gardeners set some store. Barbara was a woman of impossibly high standards and she possessed a low threshold for the shortcomings of others. Liv knew that she would have to bite down on any resentment in the years ahead if she meant to stick with Eddie, but if Eddie was anything, first and last, he was Barbara’s son and he adored the ground his mother walked on.

She imagined the village off in the distance, silent and sleeping, a fresh layer of snow falling in the darkness, the church bells calling out the hours until they woke in the morning and as she drifted to sleep, she felt a simple contentment, just to be here.

Was it because she had a feeling that Eddie was going to propose to her in the morning? Or was it just being back here, in her single bed, with the silence of the village in the fields far off? It was soothing; a balm to the hectic life of working in the A&E for the rest of the time.

The A&E – she turned it over in her thoughts, stared up at the darkness overhead. Suddenly, it was not guilt that wafted over her as she thought of Finn O’Connell stuck in A&E tonight. She had no reason to feel guilty; she’d done everything she could for him. No, it was something else that niggled at her – something she couldn’t quite put a finger on, but it felt as if she was missing something. Something vital and it made her catch her breath.