If Liv counted herself as lucky any other day of the year, it was even more pronounced at Christmas. Her mum would have spent the last month preparing for it in her own many small ways: making puddings and Christmas cakes, pretending that she’d made half the amount and giving most of them away to neighbours and friends well in advance of the holidays. Her dad, well, she could imagine him now, making hourly pilgrimages up and down the old stone sheds to check on whichever ewe was about to give birth next. And Maya would be swearing under her breath in the sitting room, trying to decorate the wonkiest Christmas tree her father could manage to find in the small plantation they’d set years earlier.

Maya was Liv’s baby sister who, it always seemed to Liv, had been born with far more sense than she needed, probably enough for both of them, not that she’d ever admit that to Maya of course.

Liv loved going home for Christmas. She adored every cheesy tacky tinselly bit of the holiday and even that first Christmas after losing Rachel, her identical twin, although she was achingly sad, somehow she had managed to feel closer to her twin sister than she had expected. Of course, Rachel loved Christmas. The year they found out she was sick, they’d volunteered at a homeless shelter near the training hospital. Liv found herself smiling remembering that time: it turned out that even in death, Rachel could cheer Liv up in spite of herself.

Was it weird that she still felt as if her twin sister might only have stepped out of the room temporarily? It wasn’t something you could go telling people. Well, she’d told Pete once, but they were both very drunk and she wasn’t sure Pete really counted. He already thought she was a little crazy and anyway, he was Rachel’s best friend and in some ways, she figured that the idea might give him the same sort of comfort that it gave her.

She waved across the foyer at old Bill Hickey the porter. He’d worked at the hospital since he left school, never missed a Christmas shift, he told her once. She had a feeling this might be his last year. He still had a spring in his step, but even Bill would have to retire at some point. She wondered if he’d come back as a volunteer or if he would be one of those colleagues who just vanished from the hospital as completely as if they’d been wiped away.