‘And you haven’t told him yet?’ Maya had said after she’d called her. Liv knew she was choosing her words carefully.

‘No. I know I should have, but I needed to get my head around things first. I needed to get everything sorted.’ The last thing she wanted was Eddie Quirke arriving back in Dublin to convince her that it was all some misunderstanding when she knew in her gut that throwing him out of the flat was the right thing to do. It was the only thing to do. ‘I’ll ring him when I’m good and ready. Let’s face it, I don’t owe him any favours at this stage.’

‘Of course,’ Maya said. ‘I know you won’t want to hear this, Liv, but I really think you should be absolutely rejoicing. You’ve had the luckiest escape from him – he’s only ever been a leech. He’d have made you completely miserable in the long run.’

‘Or I’d have made myself miserable more like.’ Liv knew that it took some sort of action for another person to have any effect either way on you. And the fact was that Eddie didn’t care enough to make her feel bad, unless it was by deflection of following his own interests. The more she thought about it, she realised, all she’d ever been was a wave to his tidal direction.

‘And as for his awful mother, yikes!’

‘Yes, at least Dad will be the over the moon on that front – no need to worry about any more not-so-cosy get-togethers with the Quirkes.’ Liv was keeping her voice light, but it would be a lie to say she wasn’t hurt and sad at the end of things, even if it was just the end of her idea of things with Eddie. She imagined Maya telling her that she’d equally miss a headache, if she’d put up with it for over six years too.

‘No, Liv, he definitely won’t be over the moon, not if he thinks Eddie Quirke hurt you in any way. You know Mum and Dad, they’d put up with anything if they thought it made us happy, even the devil himself, or his incarnate: Barbara Quirke.’

‘Listen, don’t say anything to them, not until I get home, at least. I’m going to offer to do some more shifts here, just so I have time to think and I want to sort the flat into an Eddie-free zone!’ She was going to call Pete next, tell him the truth about Anya’s affair, and ask him to keep it to himself too – for now, at least. The last thing she needed was to go home and bump into Eddie and Anya at every turn. She could just as easily take her Christmas holidays when everyone had gone back to work and it would take her out of the city when they returned.