Returning here so many years later, with liberation from a deeply stale marriage, came a sharp clarity of thought that was migraine-harsh at times. Talking to Alice had stirred a hornets’ nest of memories. There were too many long-buried regrets at the stud, the desire to seek the pure white simplicity of a fresh start overwhelming. Horses were in her past. Putting her foot back in the stirrup, as her mother advocated, would just mean riding into trouble again. She wasn’t sure how much longer she could bear it here.

The sooner she and Mack thrashed out some practical arrangements the better. Solicitor Helen was reassuringly on that case, although her firm advice was to stay put. It was she who had quietly recommended the village school as ‘the Bardswolds best-kept secret’. On paper, Compton Magna C of E Primary was perfect: sweet and much-loved, its classes smaller than any independent pre-prep in the area, a big emphasis on play. Pax had booked an appointment to look around it that afternoon, but as the time drew closer, she found herself dismissing it, telling herself that it was too uncomfortably close to her mother’s reach, that it wouldn’t be able to cope with Kes’s aggressive anxiety, that Mack would no more allow it than she would let Kes attend school in Scotland. Antisocial belligerence gripped her. She could stay hiding here instead of going. Or have a drink.

I’m out of my marriage, I can do what I bloody well like, she thought rebelliously, which wasn’t strictly true, but it made her feel momentarily elated. Whilst still never quite matching the giddy high of liberation she’d felt in Lester’s cottage kitchen on New Year’s Day, the daily doses of random euphoria were a much-needed Yang to the guilty, fearful Yin. She’d experienced happy headrushes doing the most prosaic of tasks from brushing her teeth to making a cup of tea, daily rituals that she now performed with an occasional jolt of recognition: I’m free. For all the hell she faced dismantling and rebuilding her own and Kes’s lives, she was finally free.

Getting up from his temporary Witney rug bed with a squeaky yawn and a back-kick stretch, Knott trotted to the door and looked back at her over his shoulder. The bright, innocent expectation in his dark eyes reminded Pax of Kes – the young expected their seniors to know exactly what they needed. She pictured her son on his first day in Reception just a few months earlier, swamped by his old-fashioned oversized uniform, trusting and excited as he put his hand in hers, the mother who’d already known in her heart that it was the wrong place to send him, that the draconian discipline Mack favoured would terrify him, that he deserved so much better than this prescriptive childhood born of a terminally ill marriage.

Despite her twenty-five-year head start, Pax still craved wise elders of her own who knew what she needed. In childhood, that had been her grandparents and Lester, always so decisive and capable. Later it had been Tim, the dashing big brother all grown-up in his London flat. Never her parents. Pax had no experience of close parenting until becoming one herself, and by then she’d turned gratefully to Mack as her wise voice in all things, already a father twice over. For most of her adult life, it was Mack who told her what she wanted and needed, what to do. Without him, she felt rudderless, uncertain if she trusted her own judgement, the wild elation flip-sided with a sense of being utterly lost. At her lowest, she wanted to phone him and ask him what to do.