He is on his way to bed, still turning over thoughts of Leah in his head, when he sees the envelope on the floor by the front door. The recent assault on his house and the various harassments make him wary as he approaches. But when he picks it up and draws out the letter, a hard little knot forms in his chest at the sight of the familiar handwriting.

He mounts the stairs slowly, tiredness filling his legs, like sand.

He sits on his bed and reads the letter once more. He thinks he catches the whiff of bergamot and lemon – his dead wife’s fragrance.

It is a problem he will have to confront. He cannot keep putting it off.

After a moment, he drags the box out from under his bed, stuffs the note inside it, along with all the others. Then he lies back, stretching out. Closing his eyes, he tries to sleep.

8

Hilary

‘You’re so lucky,’ Claire tells Hilary over dinner, ‘that you don’t have to put up with any of this.’

Hilary smiles and tucks into her beef chow mein while the three other women around the table nod and give sympathetic groans.

‘Hormones, hormones, hormones,’ Claire continues. ‘I’m up to my neck in hormones with Josh. Facial hair, acne, perpetual showering, not to mention the mood swings and the backchat. It’s a nightmare, I’m telling you.’

Hilary twists noodles around the tines of her fork and thinks of an afternoon many years ago, all four of them working in the same school, when Claire, who was pregnant at the time, had tripped and fallen in the staff-room. It was she – Hilary – who had put her distressed young friend in the car and driven her to the maternity hospital, staying by her side until the two of them were admitted to an examination room. There, the attending physician had drawn a paddle over the small hillock of Claire’s belly and Hilary had stared with wonder and envy at the little waving arms, the kicking miniature legs on the screen. And now to think that the tiny foetus she had glimpsed that day is growing chest hair, snogging girls at rugby club discos and giving his mother all manner of grief. Where have the years gone?

‘At least he doesn’t hate you,’ Anna states, leaning forward to make her point. ‘I’ve lost count of how many times Kelly has told me she detests me. That’s what she says! I detest you, Mother. I loathe you. Honest to God. Hell is a fifteen-year-old daughter.’

The others laugh while Hilary empties the last of the wine into her glass, then raises the bottle aloft to catch the waiter’s attention and shakes it to indicate he’s to bring another. Their third bottle of the evening, and the main course has only just arrived, but sod it, Hilary thinks, it’s only once a year.