These wobbly wooden steps from the beach brought to mind the places she would rather be. She wanted to travel—somewhere landlocked like Mexico City or Udaipur or Madrid. The Himalayas. It didn’t matter as long as it was a million miles from the ocean, high and freaking dry.

Butterflies rose in her stomach as she came to the side door to see a portrait of the men in, or on their way out of, her life: Gordon, his phone with her neglected message on the card table, was shuffling saucepans around the kitchen with a towel slobbishly over his shoulder. (How many times? How many freaking times?) Dog, at the jigsaw puzzle, was annoying the shit out of Josie, Tonsure Man and Red Cap. Jesus. And she had to walk in and pretend this was her home.

She skirted around the deck and followed Ben to the balcony, where he was avoiding the crowd inside and mind-surfing the waves below. ‘I don’t want to go in either,’ she said. ‘Fancy a spot of coordinate geometry?’

You had to have something you did with your son. Doing maths with Ben made her want to strangle him half the time, but it was better than only sharing an interest in whether he had cleaned his room.

‘Wait, what? I’ve done my homework.’

‘You’re in year eleven, darling. If you’ve done your homework, we do revision. It’ll be fun.’

Ben returned her brittle friendliness with a withering microsecond, his standard length of eye contact. You couldn’t say he was unable to express non-verbal emotion. He could, with impressive economy. She occasionally wondered if the vacuum left by Gordon’s passive acceptance of the whole break-up/infidelity thing had drawn out Ben’s latent hostility to her, and therefore done his emotional development a favour.

A blessing in disguise, then.

Freaking good disguise.

He turned away from her and went down the external stairs. Which, she had to concede, was what she deserved.

‘Okay, no geometry then,’ she said, as if they had come to an agreement. She entered the living room, where the notice the men took of her inverted her needs. Ben, who she loved more dearly than life, had run away from her. Dog, who she generally wanted to punch or fuck but at this moment to show the door, gave her a blandly pleasant hello and competitively tap-tapped a jigsaw piece between Red Cap and Josie. And Gordon, for whom she had a perplexed overhang of strong but complicated feeling, greeted her with a relieved smile and a sign language offer of dinner.

‘I’m looking for guinea pigs,’ he said.

‘Wasn’t it my cooking night?’ she said, throwing a savage look at the guests, meaning Gordon was supposed to have kicked them out by now.