That night, when Liv lay in her bed, she knew she wasn’t going to fall asleep easily. In the room next door, Maya slept contentedly, her head probably filled with land deeds and tort law and maybe, if she was lucky, a prosecution for something a little more dangerous to look forward to; perhaps defending a client in a big case in the New Year.

Liv snuggled down, expecting to dream of nothing more than snow falling on her face as she walked back to the farmhouse earlier, the taste of disappointment on her lips and a hollowed-out, disillusioned feeling in her stomach. So she pulled the quilt up tight around her, pretended that everything had turned out just as it was meant to and felt herself drifting off into a deep and dream-filled sleep before the clock struck the hour in the hall at the bottom of the stairs. She was woken just on the cusp of sleep by her phone vibrating next to her. She reached out to her night stand and pressed the on button to check her notifications. She hadn’t really looked at it all day. She had a missed call from Pete. Damn, some friend she was after all her giving out to Eddie earlier. She’d ring Pete first thing in the morning, see what was up; probably, it was nothing more than he fancied going for lunch in the next town over.

Liv drifted easily back to sleep, thinking of Pete, and somehow a smile crept across her lips and she was contented, far more content than she had a right to be.

*

In the city, Liv got up the following morning, ragged. The snow on the empty streets outside brightened everything in a sterile light. It made her shiver, quite aside from the fact that the temperatures had dropped further. It seemed, within the space of a couple of written sentences, her whole life had been capsized. In a bolt from the blue it had emptied her out as easily as if she’d been tipped over and spilled across a precipice that she’d never imagined could lie so close to life as she knew it. She hadn’t slept all night and if she did manage to close her eyes for even a moment, they shot wide open again with the certainty that there was no ignoring what she’d read in that note last night. At this point, she knew the words off by heart. She’d read it a thousand times over, sat at the kitchen table, unable to move any further. Shock. That was what it was, complete and utter shock.

Can’t see you this week, Pete is asking questions. Too much to lose.

Don’t contact me for a while,

x