‘Hey, Anna! How are you?’

She fixed a smile in place and turned to find another of Gabi’s creative, interesting friends smiling at her. ‘Oh, er, hi…’ Anna trailed off, partly because she couldn’t remember the woman’s name, but mostly because this one simple question always left her in a quandary. She was basically an honest sort of person, so when somebody asked her how she was, her automatic response was to tell the truth.

Big mistake.

Back in the early days, she’d done just that, launching into a description of how each second of the day was a painful knife-stab in her heart, how she dreaded opening her eyelids each morning. It had been so wonderful to let it all out.

But she’d soon discovered it was a great way to make her friends’ faces fall, to cause them to stammer awkwardly. More often than not, they’d invented someone on the other side of the room they urgently needed to talk to and had scurried away.

No one really wanted to hear how she was. Not after two years, nine months and eight days. Not even Gabi. Instead, they wanted to hear she was putting herself back together, that it was possible to heal from something that tragic and move on. It was selfish, really, because they were asking her to give them hope. They were asking her to reassure them that if something that awful happened to them, they’d eventually be okay too. But Anna wasn’t okay. She wasn’t even close.

Gabi’s friend was looking at her, eyebrows raised, waiting for an answer.

‘Doing good,’ Anna replied, nodding, and noticed, once again, how grief had turned her into a big fat liar. ‘How about you?’

The woman – Keisha! Her name was Keisha – nodded philosophically. ‘Oh, you know. Same old, same old…’ And then her brows drew together. ‘I heard about… you know… I’m so sorry.’ And then she did the worst possible thing: she placed a sympathetic hand on Anna’s arm. It burned.

Anna wanted to shrug it off, to glare at Keisha for stepping over an unmarked boundary, but she didn’t. ‘Oh, look!’ she said, staring at the air past the other woman’s head to the opposite side of the large and glossy open-plan kitchen. ‘I think Vanessa is looking for you.’

Their hostess was actually nowhere to be seen, but two could play at the ‘invisible friend’ game. Keisha looked torn for a brief second, then gave Anna a swift one-armed hug and hurried off. Anna breathed out and escaped in the other direction.

She was glad when the hour hand on her watch slid past nine and people got beyond the ‘meet and greet’ phase and settled into small groups, leaning against kitchen counters, staking out their places in the various seating areas. It made it easier to skirt around the edges of the party, glass of warm fizz in hand, giving the impression she’d just finished a fabulous conversation with one person and was on her way to another, when really – aside from that brief exchange with Keisha – the only person she’d properly engaged with all evening had been Gabi, and that had been in the car on the way there.