She blinked and rubbed her eyes, jangled fragments of her dream slipping from her mind. Something about giving birth, the shocking sensation of a small warm baby between her legs. How he’d cried out when he was taken away. She shook her head, not wanting to think about any of that, revelling instead in the strangeness of not having to throw the covers off and immediately run to attend to someone’s yelled demands. She didn’t have to make anyone’s breakfast or attempt to squeeze squirming, sausagey boy limbs into items of clothing or sort the never-ending laundry or . . .

She shushed her mind, stopping the thoughts before they could whirl into an exhausting list. Before she could press the bruise of being here and not there. Misplaced. Dispossessed. She wouldn’t think about Mack and the boys, or what might be happening at home. They could recede into the distance for a while until she was ready to conjure them back up, she decided. For the time being she would lie here, her head sinking into the soft pillows, the duvet protecting her from the rest of the world. It was all she could manage right now.

Some time later, after a blissful shower, she put on clean clothes and dried her hair. Even through her numbness, she could recognize that doing these things in peace and quiet felt pretty amazing. A holiday from reality. At this rate, she would never go back. Don’t think about that, she reminded herself.

Toast, hot and buttery, came next, along with a cup of coffee that she would actually get to drink all the way to the bottom for once. Plus the simple pleasure of merely sitting still at the kitchen table, just breathing in and out, whilst doing absolutely nothing. Watching idly as a family in another cottage trooped out laden with a windbreak and picnic bag, the littlest girl holding buckets and spades. Listening calmly as two seagulls duked it out in aerial combat, their harsh battle-cries carrying to her through the open window. She felt like a character in an arcade game, gradually being powered back up to full strength. Perhaps because of this, she took a deep breath and switched on her phone, braced for the bombardment of messages she knew she was in for.

Ping ping ping ping ping. The noise of so many notifications tumbling forward onto the screen was an accusation in itself. All from Mack, all saying pretty much the same thing. What the hell? Where are you? Ring me!