'I'm sorry if I treated you badly.' Deborah addressed the woman behind her but kept her gaze ahead. The land seemed to stretch out for ever. Grasses, trees, and moorland filled the view until it sloped gently into the horizon. It humbled her in a way that made her want to fall to her knees in both grief and joy. 'You never did what I didn't need, mistress.' The words of her companion hit her in the back like tiny darts, reminding her of her actions. She turned.

'I am no longer your mistress, Cheryl.' Eight years previously 'Please, doc, you need to help me.' Marcus clutched his heart, contorting his face in anguish, and writhed around on the sofa. Deborah looked briefly over her shoulder, removed a pen from behind her ear, and went back to her papers. 'Come on, please, you're killing me here .' The agonised body of her lover was now crawling towards her, gasping and flailing, trying to get her attention. He finally came to rest at her feet where he whimpered and pawed weakly at her ankles. 'Oh for God's sake, Marcus,' she said, kicking at him irritably, 'I need to work.

We're on the brink of a breakthrough.' 'So am I,' wailed Marcus, working his fingers up her calves. 'At least take a break, won't you?' Deborah ignored him and stiffened in her chair, once again returning to her work. His body went slack at her feet and she held her breath, waiting for the sigh that always signalled his defeat. It came. 'Fine,' he said, and scrambled out from under her desk, deliberately knocking her chair as he went. 'You go save every other man on the planet, but leave me to die, alone, of a broken heart and underused .' 'Enough!' she shrieked as the symbols on her page began to form a faraway formula, 'Please just shut up, will you?' She started again, trying to get in the zone where her brain ran fluidly and thoughts burst to the surface like oxygen bubbles.

Too late; her concentration had been shattered. Her heart rate slowed as unused adrenalin leaked away, leaving a nagging sense of failure and loss. She'd been so close. Why did he have to do that? She turned to her lover with fury brewing in her very cells. 'For fuck's sake, Marcus, when I say I'm working, believe me - I'm fucking working.' He lay on the sofa, his whole body flaccid with disdain. Picking up a newspaper, he flicked the pages and disappeared behind them.