Eleven fifty-six. It was almost midnight.

Anna closed her eyes and tried to stop time through the sheer strength of her will. Four minutes. Probably less than that – three and a bit – was all she had left of this year before it slid away, taking another piece of Spencer with it.

It didn’t work. When she opened her eyes again, another minute had evaporated. She stared at the phone as an inner battle began to rage. There was another ritual, you see. One that was even less healthy. In the sane part of her head, she knew that. That was why she’d banned herself from doing it. She was trying, even if Gabi didn’t think she was.

Put the phone down, she told herself. You promised yourself you wouldn’t do this again, remember? It had been months since she’d been this weak.

But she didn’t put the phone down. Slowly, deliberately, she pressed the screen and pulled up her contacts, and then, just as slowly, just as deliberately, she located Spencer’s name and hit ‘call’.

Even before it connected, she could hear the message – hear his voice – in her head: Hey! This is Spencer. I’m off having fun without you right now, but if you really have to leave a dull and boring message, you know what to do…

Oh, how she longed to do just that, to pour it all out to him, but she didn’t. It wasn’t enough. She wanted to talk to him, yes, but she didn’t want an empty, one-sided conversation. She wanted to hear his voice, his real voice, not a tinny recording from years ago. She wanted him to talk back to her. And then she could finally say what she should have said to him that last evening before he’d walked out the front door to go to the corner shop, something more meaningful than: ‘Can you grab a pint of milk while you’re there?’

Her thumb hovered above the ‘end call’ button. In all the times she’d dialled his number just to hear his voicemail greeting, she’d never once left that message because, even though Gabi might tell her she was stuck in the past, she really wasn’t. She wasn’t kidding herself. This was just an echo of him, nothing more. She knew she couldn’t bring him back.

But it seemed that if she was going to fall from grace this evening, she was going to do it spectacularly. Maybe it was because she saw the time at the top of the phone change to a row of perfect nothingness that she did it. Maybe it was all the swelling emotions inside her from that evening clamouring to be let out. Who knew? All Anna understood was that all the words she thought she’d have a lifetime to say were stuck in the logjam of her throat, and then, suddenly, three escaped. They would have to be enough.

‘I love you…’ she whispered in a voice that was raw with tears.