Most of all, she missed his touch. Not just the sex – that would be easy to get, if she were so inclined, a physical need to be met like hunger or thirst – but she missed those little moments of contact that only came with familiarity and intimacy. She missed having someone to snuggle up with on the sofa. Someone to kiss her goodbye in the mornings. Someone to fall asleep on during a train journey home after a night out in London. All seemingly tiny, inconsequential things. Except they weren’t. It had taken losing them to make her realize how essential they were.

Anna tried to ignore the feeling that she was an empty shell, nothing else inside her but this ache for something she couldn’t have. She tried to distract herself by pottering around, slipping off her shoes, hanging up her coat, putting the kettle on to make herself a cup of herbal tea she didn’t really want. But the void inside just throbbed.

Eventually, she turned on a single lamp in the living room and sat down in the corner of her sofa. It was so tidy, so neat. That was Anna’s natural state. She found it easy to put things away, to keep things ordered, but it wasn’t how their home had been when Spencer had been alive.

She reached over to the coffee table and pulled the newspaper out from the shelf underneath, then flapped the pages open and messed them around a bit, before crumpling a section up and letting it slide onto the floor. That was how he’d always left it. It had driven her mad, but now she almost missed the socks down the side of the sofa cushions and the boxers that only made it halfway into the linen basket.

She sank back into the sofa and sighed. Would it ever stop, this feeling? Wasn’t time supposed to heal all wounds? In her opinion, Time was doing a pretty crappy job. Buck up, Time! Sort yourself out. After all, it kept marching her steadily away from the last moment she’d seen Spencer living and breathing, whether she wanted it to or not. Surely it owed her a little something in return?

She tucked her legs up under herself and reached for her phone. This was a bad idea, but it had been a difficult night to get through; she was going to allow herself one small concession, one tiny weakness.

She pulled up her messages, found Spencer’s name, then scrolled back to 14 February three years earlier. He’d died a little over a month later, but on that Valentine’s Day Spencer had sent her a series of funny little text messages, crammed with emoticons and saucy suggestions about how they should spend the evening together when he got home.

Anna smiled as she reread them, revelling in not just the words but the memories of that night, memories that only two people in this world had been party to, and now she was the sole keeper of. It would be wrong to let them fade and die.