The Girl You Left Behind

open. A used teabag squats on the
     side of the sink and a knife emerges from a pat of unsalted butter, like the chest of a
     murder victim.
    Liv stands there for a moment, then begins
     to tidy, sweeping the detritus into the kitchen bin, loading cups and plates into the
     dishwasher. She presses the button to draw back the ceiling shutters, and when they are
     fully open, she presses the button that will open the glass roof, waving her hands to
     get rid of the lingering smell of smoke.
    She turns to find Mo standing in the
     doorway. ‘You can’t smoke in here. You just can’t,’ she says.
     There is a weird edge of panic to her voice.
    ‘Oh. Sure. I didn’t realize you
     had a deck.’
    ‘No. Not on the deck either. Please.
     Just don’t smoke here.’
    Mo glances at the work surface, at
     Liv’s frantic tidying. ‘Hey – I’ll do that before I leave.
     Really.’
    ‘It’s fine.’
    ‘It obviously isn’t, or you
     wouldn’t be having a heart attack. Look. Stop. I’ll clean up my own mess.
     Really.’
    Liv stops. She knows she is overreacting,
     but she can’t help it. She just wants Mo gone. ‘I’ve got to take Fran
     a cup of tea,’ she says.
    Her blood thumps in her ears the whole way
     down to the ground floor.
    When she gets back the kitchen is tidy. Mo
     moves quietly around the space. ‘I’m probably a bit lazy when it comes to
     clearing up straight away,’ she says, as Liv walks back in.‘It’s the whole clearing-up-at-work thing. Old people, guests at
     restaurants … You do so much of it in the day, you kind of rebel against it at
     home.’
    Liv tries not to bristle at her use of the
     word. It is then she becomes aware of the other smell, under the smoke. And the oven
     light is on.
    She bends down to peer inside it and sees
     her Le Creuset dish, its surface bubbling with something cheesy.
    ‘I made some supper. Pasta bake. I
     just threw together what I could get from the corner shop. It’ll be ready in about
     ten minutes. I was going to have mine later, but seeing as you’re
     here …’
    Liv cannot remember the last time she even
     turned the oven on.
    ‘Oh,’ says Mo, reaching for the
     oven gloves. ‘And someone rang from the council.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘Yeah. Something about council
     tax.’
    Liv’s insides turn briefly to
     water.
    ‘I said I was you, so he told me how
     much you owe. It’s quite a lot.’ She hands her a piece of paper with a
     figure scribbled on it.
    As Liv’s mouth opens to protest, she
     says, ‘Well, I had to make sure he had the right person. I thought he must have
     made a mistake.’
    She had known roughly how much it would be,
     but seeing it in print is still a shock. She feels Mo’s eyes on her and, in her
     uncharacteristically long silence, she knows that Mo has guessed the truth.
    ‘Hey. Sit down. Everything looks
     better on a full stomach.’ She feels herself being steered into a chair. Mo flipsopen the oven door, allowing the kitchen to flood with the
     unfamiliar smell of home-cooked food. ‘And if not, well, I know of a really
     comfortable banquette.’
    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