Like a child on Christmas Eve, it took Liv ages to fall asleep. She ran it over in her mind, a thousand times – how Eddie would propose. She wondered if perhaps Barbara had told him it was time to make an honest woman of Liv – it was the sort of thing she could imagine Eddie’s mother saying. Eventually, she began to nod off as the crows shook their feathers in the tall trees that dotted all about her father’s farm.

*

At eight o’clock her alarm went off and she silenced it as quickly as she could. She had offered to prepare and cook the turkey; there was stuffing to make and probably a bit of cleaning up to do on the bird before she could pop it in the oven.

‘Have you had your breakfast yet?’ her father asked after she’d begun in the kitchen. He had already been up and checking the ewes he’d moved closer to the house who were due to lamb at any moment.

‘I’ve just got the turkey started; now, let’s have breakfast together.’ Liv was delighted to have a little while longer on her own with him before anyone else arrived.

‘I’ve a better idea,’ he said taking up Liv’s wellingtons from inside the back door and handing them to her. With piping-hot mugs of tea and wedges of her mother’s home-made brown bread in their hands, he led her down to the little sheds that sheltered between the house and the huge farm building that he’d constructed further on when she was still a teenager. For some time, that had been his pride and joy, but these days, she had a feeling that the little old sheds, with their wobbly stone, sloping roofs and brightly painted doors suited him much better.

The cold stung Liv’s face, the only part of her it could get at, since she was bundled up in one of her father’s huge coats, and Maya’s gloves and hat that she’d picked up in the porch. Still, it was refreshing, walking along with the crunch of icy gravel beneath her feet and the rasp of the bitter air in her lungs. She looked out across the frosty fields in the distance. The only houses visible from here seemed to meld in with the whiteness of the landscape. The sky was a muted grey and it merely added to the blend of neutrals – the only relief the dark blue Atlantic. It was winter harsh and uninterrupted in its raw splendour.