‘I know it seems like a long time, but maybe it will be good for us … to have a break from each other. Things haven’t been … Please, Tom, don’t make me feel guilty about this.’

Still he didn’t speak, his fork hanging above his plate as if his body had forgotten how to move.

‘What about the kids?’ They were the words she had been dreading. ‘We could come with you. It could be an adventure. You always said you wanted one of those.’

‘No!’ she snapped. She paused, collecting herself, then went on more calmly, ‘We’ve done it before, and you knew, Tom, that this is part of my job. You’ve always known.’ The only way forward was over and through, wading past the obstacles she couldn’t bear to acknowledge.

Tom inhaled, cupping his chin with his hands. Sitting back in his chair, as if seeing her in a way that required inspection from a greater distance, he nodded slowly, and for a hideous moment she wondered if he suspected. He didn’t though, and she was almost angry at him that he could look at her and not see what was happening in front of his eyes, the changes that you couldn’t ignore. But then how could he ever have guessed?

‘I’ll be back,’ she said, her voice cracking. ‘I’ll make it up to Sadie and Callum. To you.’

He didn’t move his eyes from her face.

‘Whatever you need to do.’

There was something so discomforting about the acceptance in his words, so heartbreaking, that she closed her eyes.

‘Hey, Gabriela, no …’

As he walked around to her, pressing her body into his, she heard the bed above their heads creak and then the sound of her children’s feet on the stairs.

Chapter 51

Gabriela

‘Hey, we said no tears. Remember?’ She brushed Callum’s fingers away from his eyes, the morning she left.

‘Mummy will be home before you know it! And we can talk all the time – any time you’re missing me, you just ask Daddy to call me on WhatsApp, OK? That way the call will be free.’

Or, rather, this way no one would notice the absence of a foreign ringtone.

Her daughter gave her a broken smile.

‘I’m sorry,’ Gabriela told her, though she hadn’t intended to use those words, dangerously interlaced as they were with so many things she couldn’t say. ‘I’m going to call you every day, OK?’

‘I want you to take Otto.’ Callum shifted forward, proffering his stuffed rabbit, the one he had slept with in his bed pretty much every night since he was born.

She felt a fist in her stomach. ‘I can’t take Otto, he’s your—’

‘I want you to take him, to keep you warm. Joseph says it’s so cold in Russia that they have polar bears.’