She’d felt dizzy and breathless. Spencer had a way of doing that to her, of making her question if up was down and down was up; he was the magnet to her compass needle.

‘I love you too,’ she’d whispered back, and his smile had grown even wider, but then the edges of his mouth had turned downwards.

‘I beg your pardon?’ he’d said, mischief twinkling in his eyes. ‘I don’t think I quite heard you.’

She’d laughed softly, then had cleared her throat and tried again, louder this time. ‘I love you too.’

Spencer had cupped a hand to his ear. ‘Nope! Still can’t hear you.’ She’d punched him playfully on the arm. He’d kept moving closer and closer until their lips had almost touched, then he’d suddenly let go of her and had leaped onto one of the benches facing the river, feet planted wide, arms outstretched. ‘When you love someone,’ he’d shouted, ‘you don’t say it quietly, you proclaim it from the rooftops! Like this…’ And he’d bellowed to the seagulls sitting on the ropes of lights between the lampposts. ‘I love you, Anna Mason! I’ve loved you since the day I met you and I always will!’

He’d held out his hand to her and she’d taken it, let him help her up onto the bench so she’d been standing beside him, trying not to let the heels of her boots get stuck between the wooden slats. He’d grinned at her, waiting for her to follow suit, and she’d almost yelled her own declaration of love into the night air, but something had stopped her. Instead, she’d turned to face him. Sometimes, Spencer needed to know that his way wasn’t the only way.

‘You heard, you idiot,’ she’d mumbled into his ear, and then she’d kissed him just as softly and just as sweetly as he’d kissed her.

After that, it had become their ‘thing’ – if she said ‘I love you’ first, he always responded with: ‘I beg your pardon?’, and then she’d cap it off by whispering: ‘You heard, idiot’. She’d imagined them saying it to each other well into their eighties…

A sob escaped her lips and she sank to the floor of the wardrobe, taking both shirt and hanger with her, and then she buried her face in the blue-and-white striped cotton and cried until there were no tears left.

How was it possible to ache for someone this way? Not just metaphorically, but literally? Now she understood why people talked about having a broken heart, because she knew it was entirely possible for it to throb in pain along with every single beat.

She lost track of time, curled up on the wardrobe floor with Spencer’s shirt clutched to her chest. Eventually, though, she blinked, regained the sense of where and who she was. The ache didn’t stop, though. It never stopped.

She reached out to retrieve her bag from the bedroom floor and then returned to the wardrobe. Once she was huddled with her back against the wall, she pulled her phone out and pressed a button to wake it up.