Granted, this was still a holiday in the UK and she wasn’t a complete fantasist, so there was a hoody and a jumper amidst the pile of clothes too, as well as five pairs of hiking socks and some comfortable bras, but hey. This already felt like a huge departure from her usual frigid single-mum holidays, where she avoided all the perfect nuclear two-parent families on the beaches, where she felt under torturous, stifling pressure to give her children a great time. Or, at the very least, a better time than they’d have with Dom and sodding Michelle.

Until the phone call two days ago. There’s been a slight hitch, George had said. Yeah, you’re telling me, mate. The slight hitch being that Charlotte had been asked to go abroad at the last minute, to speak at a conference in Berlin, and, because she was currently ‘between nannies’, George had been lumped with Seren instead.

Not ‘lumped with’, Em corrected herself in the next moment. Because George had actually sounded quite excited about the prospect of getting their children together like this, as if they were one of those modern blended families who moved in and out of each other’s spheres with ease. ‘I know it might seem a bit sudden, but I’m sure the kids would get on okay,’ he had said.

‘Mmm,’ Em had replied, unable to sound very convincing.

‘And didn’t you say it was a big place you’d rented? So there’d be room for another little one, right?’

‘Ye-e-e-es,’ she’d said, reconfiguring bedroom allocations in her head.

‘Otherwise I guess I would have to miss the first week and just catch up with you guys for the second half of the holiday,’ George suggested regretfully, when Em didn’t offer any further encouragement. ‘What do you think?’

What did she think? Her instinct was that George plus Seren would almost certainly be better than no George at all. Even if it did mean the slight risk that she would wake up in the night to find Seren leaning over her with a bread knife, of course. Or that she would receive a hard, unexpected shove down the stairs by the girl and end up paralysed for life, even dead. Perhaps Seren would spy on Em and send video evidence of her dreadfulness to perfect Charlotte. Oh God, the possibilities were endless and alarming. The holiday could easily turn into a nightmare!

‘Em?’ George prompted, before unwittingly going on to crank her doubts right up to What-the-Hell? level. ‘Charlotte’s really sorry,’ he’d said. ‘And don’t worry, I asked her to come and pick up Seren when she’s back, so that I don’t have to go shuttling back and forth again, and she said that was fine. Which is something.’