Erica arranged slices of buttered date loaf on a plate and placed it on the coffee table. She’d got up early to bake despite there still being plenty of other offerings in the freezer from Stuart’s wake ten days earlier.

Having something to focus on that wasn’t her sadness and the great gaping hole in her life was important, even though baking, like so many other everyday tasks, was also a horrible reminder that life just carried on, regardless of the assault on normality she had just endured. When she let her mind go there … Erica tried hard to not think too deeply about anything much because no one thought ever completely stood alone. Most things were connected, with one idle ponderance linking to or prompting another. Before grief, thoughts and memories tied together had been comfortable and comforting. She longed for the occasional isolated memory, a single grain of sand, but instead got pulled into quicksand, the darkness and drag of which took a lot of effort to resist. Today she hoped baking from scratch instead of taking out some cake and watching it defrost on the bench would distract from the quicksand. (And she would have watched because all too often lately she was having to drag her attention away from some- thing after losing chunks of time staring mindlessly.)