She let out a growl of frustration and made her way upstairs to her bedroom, where she lay down on the unmade bed and pulled the duvet up over her head. Damned if she did, damned if she didn’t. It was all too much.

But the usual comfort of her blank, white cocoon didn’t help her today. Even so, she closed her eyes and breathed in and out, at a total loss for anything else to do.

One moment, that was all she had wanted.

One moment to be still today, to remember him in the way she wanted to, so she could start doing what everyone was always telling her she needed to and move forward. But it seemed she wasn’t allowed that.

As much as the focus was always on Spencer when she visited his family, she couldn’t talk freely to Gayle, even though she wished she could, and she didn’t want to worry her own parents. Gabi tried, God bless her, she really did, but she only wanted to hear good and positive and healthy things, and the truth was, some days Anna was anything but those things. Sometimes she needed to be despondent and negative and toxic. It was the only way to let the poison out.

She lay under the duvet in a half-trance, letting her thoughts wander, like a bird hopping from branch to branch in search of a roost. They came to rest in an unexpected place.

There had been one person who’d listened, a someone who’d seemed to actually understand.

But this person was also a no one, an anonymous voice at the end of a phone line, completely unconnected from her life, from all the emotional baggage anyone who’d known her or Spencer came with.

Things happen, he’d said. Things that turn you upside down and your life takes a very different path.

Spencer’s number had been assigned to him, the no one. She really wanted to call that number again, she discovered, which was more than a little surprising. Maybe it was because, in her mind, he was still part of that connection to Spencer.

But phoning again would be completely weird. This time she’d be ringing to speak to him and not the ghost of her long-dead husband. This man. This stranger.

This kindred spirit.

That thought stuck in her head for the rest of the evening. She stayed in bed, reading, moping, staring at the ceiling. After a few hours, she took a bath and got into her PJs, then returned to bed to read and mope and stare at the ceiling some more.

Eventually, she could avoid the urge no longer. She pulled her phone off the bedside table and pressed the entry near the top of her ‘recents’ list, the number still labelled as ‘Spencer’. Her heart thudded as she waited for it to connect. She closed her eyes and prayed hard she wouldn’t hear the robotic voicemail message, and it seemed, for once, her prayers were to be answered. The ringing stopped, and shortly afterwards, a deep male voice said, ‘Yes?’