There was a heartbeat of silence, then another.

And then the reply came.

‘I beg your pardon?’

Chapter Four

SOMETIMES, WAKING UP is like emerging from a gentle, white fog. Slowly, the mist clears, and one finds oneself refreshed and ready to face the morning, seeing and thinking clearly. Unfortunately for Anna, waking up the following day was more like the aftermath of being buried alive in an avalanche. Her sleep had been blessedly blank and white, but it felt as if something heavy was sitting on her chest, pinning her to the bed, and she couldn’t quite make sense of her surroundings. She lay there, unable to move, unable to think. Eventually she began to punch herself free.

The first step was to get her eyelids open. She blinked a few times and just about managed, even though one eye was being more co-operative than the other, and turned to focus on the clock, but where she’d expected to see a digital display, there was now an old-fashioned alarm clock with bells on the top and little brass feet.

Even though the thick curtains were drawn, only barely emitting light, she realized the window was in the wrong place. It should have been on the right side of the room, but it was clearly on the left.

She sat up in bed, frowning, and then – finally – it all began to fall into place. She wasn’t in her bedroom, but the spare room. She rubbed a hand over her gritty eyes and her stomach lurched.

Oh, God. Last night… The phone call.

She didn’t even remember hearing Spencer’s voicemail greeting, she realized, only what had come afterwards – the voice, the one that had spoken where there should have been only emptiness and silence.

When she’d heard it, she’d immediately thrown the phone into the far reaches of the wardrobe, then had half-crawled, half-scrabbled her way across the bedroom floor until she’d reached the opposite wall, where she’d sat with her back pressed up against it, her knees pulled up against her body, staring at the open wardrobe as if a ghostly apparition might emerge at any second. At some point, she’d stopped shaking enough to stand up, stumble from the room and make it across the hallway, where she’d collapsed into this bed and, if the bedclothes were anything to go by, had slept fitfully and frantically.

She’d had all sorts of strange dreams after Spencer had died, ones where they’d been living their normal lives, and they had seemed so real that waking up again had been like being back in those first awful days after the accident. And then there were the nightmares…

But the dreams weren’t always bad. Sometimes, in that twilight between sleeping and waking, she’d imagine him there in the bed beside her, warm and solid and alive. Once or twice she was sure she’d felt his breath on her back, his fingers brushing her thigh, but when she’d woken up properly, his side of the bed had been cool and unwrinkled. She’d assumed it was her subconscious refusing to accept the truth, trying to fill the gaping hole he’d left behind.