Olivia sat there like a piece of stone while the boys roiled and boiled around her. She put her head in her hands and tried to calculate how many minutes and hours it would be before he walked back through the door again, but her brain was too fogged with the bad night she’d had to compute that far. A lot of minutes, anyway. Too many hours. They stretched out before her like empty boxes on a conveyor belt and she wondered how she would fill them. If she would ever reach the end.

Pinned up on the fridge with a Peppa Pig magnet was one of their wedding photos, and her gaze rested numbly on it for a moment. It was like looking at a pair of strangers. There they were, she and Mack, so happy on their special day. Olivia in her lace-sleeved dress, her hair pinned up in an elaborate style, her face so bright and joyful as she leaned against her handsome husband, the two of them with their arms around each other beneath a rose-covered arching trellis in the hotel grounds. She loved the way that Mack’s shock of unruly brown hair was just starting to loosen from its previously controlled neatness, that his tie was already askew. It was as if the real Mack, who was happiest in a pair of knackered shorts and a beat-up old T-shirt – the Mack who resisted suits and hair products as if he had some kind of allergy – was on the verge of bursting through Wedding Mack in all his finery.

Just look at them both, though, innocents that they were. They had no idea that eleven months later they would be parents of hell-raising twins and would never sleep again.

Meanwhile the boys were still fighting, she could hear their muffled thuds and yells and knew she should go and separate them before one of them was hurt or something got broken. And yet inertia had already settled upon her. A deadening sort of paralysis. Annoyance – no, actually, anger – at the fact that Mack, having worked long hours out at work all week, could then just go off on a bender with his mates for the whole weekend like this without a second thought. As if she didn’t matter. As if she had nothing better to do than the endless laundry and cleaning and childcare. Her next job would presumably be to disentangle her bloodthirsty boys without any of them losing a finger or eye in the process. Great.

His life hadn’t come to a screeching halt three years ago, had it? Oh no. Quite the opposite in fact. Mack’s star was very much in the ascendant, with great demand for his company, which specialized in turning around struggling businesses. He was proud of his longer days in the office, proud that he could support the family with his run of big contracts.