Her conviction that their relationship was solid made it all the harder when it ended. She hadn’t seen it coming. Just as she hadn’t seen it with her father.

She’d been twelve years old when her father had walked out, taking her sense of security with him.

Her mother hadn’t seen that coming either, and for months she’d operated in a daze, convinced that he’d return once he realized what he was missing.

He loves you, Milly. Even if he wanted to leave me, he’d never leave you.

Milly had clung to that, feeling a weight of responsibility that she didn’t entirely understand. When he hadn’t returned, Milly had taken it to mean that even if he did love her, then he didn’t love her enough.

She’d been looking for someone who would love her enough ever since, and she thought she’d found that in Richard.

With a sigh she sat up in bed. She had to stop dwelling on it. Churning. She hadn’t wanted this to happen but it had, and now she had to find a way to live with it. What she needed was a clean break from him, but when you had a child together, that was not an option. How was she supposed to move on when she was forced to talk to him and see him in person and bite her tongue when he was unreliable?

This new version of Richard was nothing like the Richard she’d married, but she was determined to keep things calm and civilized for Zoe, so she’d been careful to avoid conflict. The result was that she stewed and boiled inside.

Not having Nicole there to talk to had been one of the hardest things about the past eighteen months, and seeing her in person the night before had made it even harder because Milly had been reminded of what they’d lost.

After that tense car journey she’d felt so exhausted and vulnerable she’d almost thrown her arms around Nicole and forgiven her for not being there for her, but something had stopped her. Self-preservation? A desire to be less of a pushover? Maybe it was fear of rejection, although she should be used to rejection by now. She’d experienced enough of it.

And she still didn’t really understand why Nicole was here.

She reached for her phone and did the one thing she’d resisted doing up until this point. She looked at the news reports that Nicole had mentioned. They weren’t really news reports of course, because the sex life of an actor, even a Hollywood star, wasn’t news, it was gossip. It had no relevance to the public beyond morbid fascination, but that didn’t stop the story dominating, probably because it provided light relief from the flood of grim stories that populated the headlines.