Bollocks. Damn, blast and bugger. He’d been relying on Tilly but it had been hopelessly optimistic, he saw now. Since Tilly began her side hustle she reacted less well to being asked to do extra hours and he suspected that she’d one day drop being a nanny and stick to gardens. Still, he was angry with himself for not acknowledging her gardening work as important before asking her to shove a week’s worth of it back.

He turned to his electronic diary, being ruthless about what meetings he could put off to the following week, trying to remember how much you could get done working from home with a two-year-old running around and realising that without Josie to play with during school hours Maria might turn fretful and miss her mum.

He checked the Josie rota and saw that as well as getting Josie up in the mornings Emelie was currently down to take over from Tilly on Tuesday and Thursday at six because he had meetings likely to run late. Maybe he could ask whether she’d be able to pitch in a little more. From the corner of his eye he saw a Facebook notification pop up. Hannah Anna Goodbody has sent you a friend request. She was right that it was an eye-catching name. He remembered, when they were teens, Rob simultaneously liking ‘Goodbody’ for himself but not jokes about the name and his little sister.

He grinned faintly, feeling cheered by the echoes of days at the rink, the hiss of skates on ice, his dad Lars putting the team through endless skills training, Hannah bringing cookies with her mum, or taking youngsters out on the ice while Lars had the team clustered around the whiteboard talking about match play. Visiting Hannah and Rob’s village of stone or brick cottages, chattering at their dinner table, laughing, hanging out ‘over the fields’, as the kids called the areas outside leafy Middledip. There had been a nearby private estate that had proved an irresistible draw. He remembered being chased out of a posh gazebo by estate staff and over a bridge onto the public footpaths, laughing, breathless, pulling a panting Hannah along because her legs were shorter, climbing the fence into the primary school grounds to escape.

It had been nearly Christmas then, too. Snorting with laughter, they’d hidden amongst the families queuing to go into the school Christmas concert. He’d loved Christmas in the village: the traditional bits like carol singers gathering at The Cross, muffled in coats and scarves; the over-the-top stuff like competing neighbours smothering their cottages with twinkling fairy lights. His first experience of kisses beneath the mistletoe had been at the teen party at the village hall.