The food is good. Liv eats a plateful and sits with her hands on her stomach afterwards, wondering why she is so surprised that Mo can actually cook. ‘Thanks,’ she says, as Mo mops up the last of hers. ‘It was really good. I can’t remember the last time I ate that much.’

‘No problem.’

And now you have to leave. The words that have been on her lips for the past twenty hours do not come. She does not want Mo to go just yet. She does not want to be alone with the council-tax people and the final demands and her own uncontrollable thoughts; she feels suddenly grateful that tonight she will have somebody to talk to – a human defence against the date.

‘So. Liv Worthing. The whole husband-dying thing –’

Liv puts her knife and fork together. ‘I’d rather not talk about it.’

She feels Mo’s eyes on her. ‘Okay. No dead husbands. So – what about boyfriends?’

‘Boyfriends?’

‘Since … the One We Must Not Mention. Anyone serious?’

‘No.’

Mo picks a piece of cheese from the side of the baking dish.

‘Ill-advised shags?’

‘Nope.’

Mo’s head shoots up. ‘Not one? In how long?’

‘Four years,’ Liv mumbles.

She is lying. There was one, three years ago, after well-meaning friends had insisted she had to ‘move on’. As if David had been some kind of obstacle. She had drunk herself halfway to oblivion to go through with it and then wept afterwards, huge, snotty sobs of grief and guilt and self-disgust. The man – she can’t even remember his name – had barely been able to contain his relief when she had said she was going home. Even now when she thinks about it she feels cold shame.

‘Nothing in four years? And you’re … what? Thirty? What is this, some kind of sexual suttee? What are you doing, Worthing? Saving yourself for Mr Dead Husband in the hereafter?’

‘I’m Halston. Liv Halston. And … I just … haven’t met anyone I wanted to …’ Liv decides to change the direction of this conversation. ‘Okay, how about you? Some nice self-harming Emo in the wings?’ Defensiveness has made her spiky.

Mo’s fingers creep towards her cigarettes and retreat again.

‘I do okay.’

Liv waits.

‘I have an arrangement.’

‘An arrangement?’

‘With Ranic, the wine waiter. Every couple of weeks we hook up for a technically proficient but ultimately soulless coupling. He was pretty rubbish when we started but he’s getting the hang of it.’ She eats another stray piece of cheese. ‘Still watches too much  p**n , though. You can tell.’

‘Nobody serious?’

‘My parents stopped talking about grandchildren some time around the turn of the century.’

‘Oh, God. That reminds me: I promised I’d ring my dad.’ Liv has a sudden thought. She stands and reaches for her bag. ‘Hey, how about I nip down to the shop and get a bottle of wine?’ This is going to be fine, she tells herself. We’ll talk about parents and people I don’t remember, and college, and Mo’s jobs, and I’ll steer her away from the whole sex thing, and before I know it tomorrow will be here and my house will feel normal and today’s date will be a whole year away again.

Mo pushes her chair back from the table. ‘Not for me,’ she says, scooping up her plate. ‘I’ve got to get changed and shoot.’

‘Shoot?’

‘Work.’

Liv’s hand is on her purse. ‘But – you said you’d just finished.’

‘My day shift. Now I start my evening shift. Well, in about twenty minutes.’ She pulls her hair up and clips it into place. ‘You okay to wash up? And all right if I take that key again?’

The brief sense of wellbeing that had arrived with the meal evaporates, like the popping of a soap bubble. She sits at the half-cleared table, listening to Mo’s tuneless humming, the sound of her washing and scrubbing her teeth in the spare-room bathroom, the soft closing of the bedroom door.

She calls up the stairs. ‘Do you think they need anyone else tonight? I mean – I could help out. Maybe. I’m sure I could do waitressing.’

There is no reply.

‘I did work in a bar once.’

‘Me too. It made me want to stab people in the eye. Even more so than waiting tables.’

Mo is back in the hallway, dressed in a black shirt and bomber jacket, an apron under her arm. ‘See you later, dude,’ she calls. ‘Unless I get lucky with Ranic, obvs.’

She is gone, downstairs, drawn back into the world of living. And as the echo of her voice dies away, the stillness of the Glass House becomes a solid, weighty thing and Liv realizes, with a growing sense of panic, that her house, her haven, is preparing to betray her.

She knows that she cannot spend this evening here alone.

14

These are the places it is not a good idea to drink alone if you’re female.

  Bazookas: this used to be the White Horse, a quiet pub on the corner opposite the coffee shop, stuffed with sagging plush velvet benches and the occasional horse brass, its sign half obscured by age-related paint loss. Now it is a neon-clad titty bar, where businessmen go late, and taut-faced girls with too much makeup leave in platform shoes some time in the small hours, smoking furiously and moaning about their tips.

Dino’s: the local wine bar, packed throughout the nineties, has reinvented itself as a spit-and-sawdust eatery for yummy mummies in the daylight hours. After eight o’clock in the evening it now runs occasional speed-dating sessions. The rest of the time, apart from Fridays, its floor-to-ceiling windows reveal it to be conspicuously and painfully empty.