But Mo is silent. When she finally speaks she says simply, ‘Bummer.’ Her face is pale, impassive.

‘Yup,’ Liv says, and lets out a small breath. ‘Yup, it really is.’

Liv listens to the one o’clock news on the radio, distantly aware of the sounds from the guest bathroom, the vague prickle of disquiet that she feels whenever someone else is in the house. She wipes the granite work surfaces and buffs them with a soft cloth. She sweeps non-existent crumbs from the floor. Finally she walks through the glass and wood hallway, then up the suspended wood and Perspex stairs to her bedroom. The stretch of unmarked cupboard doors gleams, giving no clue to the few clothes behind it. The bed sits vast and empty in the middle of the room, two Final Reminders on the covers, where she left them this morning. She sits down, folding them neatly back into their envelopes, and she stares straight ahead of her at the portrait of The Girl You Left Behind, vivid in its gilded frame among the muted eau de Nil and grey of the rest of the room, and allows herself to drift.

She looks like you.

She looks nothing like me.

She had laughed at him giddily, still flush with new love. Still prepared to believe in his vision of her.

You look just like that when you –

The Girl You Left Behind smiles.

Liv begins to undress, folding her clothes before she places them, neatly, on the chair near the end of the bed. She closes her eyes before she turns off the light so that she does not have to look at the painting again.

12

Some lives work better with routines, and Liv Halston’s is one of them. Every weekday morning she rises at seven thirty a.m., pulls on her trainers, grabs her iPod, and before she can think about what she is doing, she heads down, bleary-eyed, in the rackety lift, and out for a half-hour run along the river. At some point, threading her way through the grimly determined commuters, swerving round reversing delivery vans, she comes fully awake, her brain slowly wrapping itself around the musical rhythms in her ears, the soft thud-thud-thud of her feet hitting the pavements. Most importantly, she has steered herself away again from a time she still fears: those initial waking minutes, when vulnerability means that loss can still strike her, unheralded and venal, sending her thoughts into a toxic black fug. She had begun running after she had realized that she could use the world outside, the noise in her earphones, her own motion, as a kind of deflector. Now it has become habit, an insurance policy. I do not have to think. I do not have to think. I do not have to think.

Especially today.

She slows to a brisk walk, buys a coffee, and rides the lift back up to the Glass House, her eyes stinging with sweat, unsightly damp patches on her T-shirt. She showers, dresses, drinks her coffee and eats two slices of toast with marmalade. She keeps almost no food in the house, having concluded that the sight of a full fridge is oddly overwhelming; a reminder that she should be cooking and eating, not living on crackers and cheese. A fridge full of food is a silent rebuke to her solitary state.

Then she sits at her desk and checks her email for whatever work has come in overnight from copywritersperhour.com. Or, as seems to have been the case recently, not.

‘Mo? I’m leaving a coffee outside your door.’ She stands, her head cocked, waiting for some sound suggesting life within. It’s a quarter past eight: too early to wake a guest? It has been so long since she had anyone to stay that she no longer knows the right things to do. She waits awkwardly, half expecting some bleary response, an irritable grunt, even, then decides that Mo is asleep. She had worked all evening, after all. Liv places the polystyrene cup silently outside the door, just in case, and heads off to her shower.

There are four messages in her inbox.

Dear Ms Halston

I got your email from copywritersperhour.com. I run a personalized stationery business and have a brochure that needs rewriting. I notice your rates are £100 per 1000 words. Would you consider dropping that price at all? We are working on a very tight budget. The brochure copy currently stands at around 1250 words.

Yours sincerely

Mr Terence Blank

Livvy darling

This is your father. Caroline has left me. I am bereft. I have decided to have nothing more to do with women. Call me if you can spare the time.

Hi Liv

Everything okay for Thursday? The kids are really looking forward to it. We’re looking at around 20 at the moment, but as you know this figure is always fluid. Let me know if you need anything.

Best regards

Abiola

  Dear Ms Halston

We’ve tried several times to reach you by phone without success. Please could you contact us to arrange a time whereby we can discuss your overdraft situation. If you fail to make contact we will have to impose additional charges.

Please can you also ensure that we have your up-to-date contact details.

Yours sincerely

Damian Watts,

Personal accounts manager, NatWest Bank

She types a response to the first.

Dear Mr Blank. I would love to drop my prices to accommodate you. Unfortunately my biological make-up means I also have to eat. Good luck with your brochure.

She knows there will be somebody out there who will do it more cheaply, someone who doesn’t care too much about grammar or punctuation, and will not notice that the brochure copy contains ‘their’ for ‘there’ twenty-two times. But she is tired of having her already meagre rates pushed down further.

Dad, I will call round later. If Caroline happens to have returned between now and then, please make sure you are dressed. Mrs Patel said you were watering the Japanese anemones naked again last week and you know what the police said about that.