• The black minute hand slowly edged forward, counting down the seconds until five o'clock. Outside, the bleak afternoon was darkening swiftly into night. Passersby, umbrellaed and gusted by wind, struggled with parcels. A stream of traffic waited for the lights to change. She furled her umbrella, put on her gloves and began to button her coat. Reaching into her immense handbag, Kayleigh pulled out her latch key and shut up shop. As she stepped out onto the wet pavement, it was so cold and wet that the prospect of a trudge through icy wind and rain was almost more than she could bear; so, after walking up the road, she finally flagged down a cab. Because of one-way streets and snarled-up traffic, it took perhaps ten minutes longer than if she had made the journey on foot, and cost so much that she simply handed the driver a pound note and let him count out the meager change.

    There was still a little ways to go, across puddles and shining wet cobbles before she reached at last the haven of her own front door. She reached inside and switched on the light and at once felt enclosed and safe, letting her fingers glide against the gilded surfaces of the wallpaper and staring down the stairwell as she climbed up the steep, narrow steps carpeted in worn beige. Emerging at the top, she shed her umbrella and went to draw the curtains against the night. She lit the gas fire and went to the hall table where a pile of letters sat inevitably to be opened. Walking through to the tiny kitchen, she took a steaming mug of tea from the stove.

    She went back to the fireside, and started sifting through the letters. "I thought I paid that bill," she muttered under her breath, throwing it away for tomorrow morning when she would be more awake than she was now. Something blue stuck out of the pile of crisp white and she pulled it out, letting the others fall onto the plush velvet carpet of the sitting room. There it was. She didn't have to open it to know what was inside. Well it wasn't like she didn't know it was coming. The dinners eaten alone, the letters gone unanswered, the late business hours. They were telling, even when she was only eight. She could recognize the signs better than her mother ever could. So why did it feel as though she had fallen down twenty-three stories in a very fast lift? She could hear the wind blow a scrap of newspaper across the street and the beating of her own heart.