But she’d needed something to fill her days, so she’d applied for an admin job at a successful family-run plumbing business, and she’d now been there more than two years. What with it being winter, pipes freezing and boilers giving out, there was likely to be a lot of paperwork to catch up on after the Christmas break. Today was not the day to be late.

When she emerged from the shower, pink and scrubbed, she wrapped a towel around herself and hurried out onto the landing, but then she hesitated. The next logical place to go was the bedroom. She needed fresh clothes. But she hadn’t been in there since she’d fled the house the day before.

Stop being daft, she lectured herself. There’s nothing to be frightened of.

Before she could talk herself out of it, she walked into her bedroom. Spencer had very helpfully pointed out that one of her weaknesses was bottling everything up until she reached boiling point and then, when it exploded out of her, she did and said bizarre things. Was it too much of a stretch to think that she’d hear bizarre things as well?

She walked towards the wardrobe, slowly, quietly, almost as if she was creeping up on it, and then she hooked her fingers around the edge of the half-open door and pulled. Her phone glinted at her from the floor, looking so ordinary, so innocent. She bent down and picked it up.

There. That hadn’t been so hard, had it?

And because it hadn’t been hard, because it all felt a bit surreal, like something that had happened in a dream, she pressed her thumb to the wake-up button and brought the display to life.

She pulled up her phone history. There, near the top of the list, was a call made at exactly midnight on New Year’s Eve. She became aware of a woolly, tangled feeling in her stomach, a strange tightness in her chest. The evidence was there. She’d really dialled. She’d really said, ‘I love you’.

The real question was: what had she heard in the silence that had followed? Nothing? Something? Her imagination going wild?

It had to be that.

She couldn’t entertain anything else. She couldn’t let herself hope and then let those hopes be dashed again. As low and lifeless as she felt at the moment, it was nothing compared to the first few months after Spencer’s death. She didn’t want to go hurtling back to that dark place.

Which meant what she did next was important. She was on a threshold. A knife edge. And there was only one possible direction she could let herself fall.

She lifted her thumb and swiped, deleting the log of just that one call. There. Gone. It had never happened.

Chapter Seven

THE FEBRUARY NIGHT air was cool on Anna’s skin as she walked towards home. She’d known that coming out tonight was going to be a mistake, but she’d come anyway, only to be proven right. Instead of feeling buoyant and energized as Gabi had promised, she felt exhausted and flat.