She pocketed it without looking. ‘Thanks.’

‘You know, talking about it helped me too.’

She nodded. ‘You need to get her out of your system as well as the alcohol.’

‘When you asked if I still love her, the honest answer is no. It got way too poisonous and it turned us into bad people, all the goodness rotted out. But falling out of love with somebody feels like such a sin, especially if you know you share a child. You look around for someone else to take the fall with you, don’t you?’

Pax thought about her mother to whom Luca had been drawn for her carpe diem optimism. ‘A lover?’

‘Or a drinking buddy.’

‘Or a priest to take confession.’

‘I stopped doing all that years ago. I sit in cars with complicated women instead.’

‘This isn’t your first time?’ She feigned innocent shock.

Half smiling, he looked away and they fell silent as they sat side by side in the confined space, staring out of the windscreen. Not lovers or drinking buddies. Something far more intimate. The car suddenly felt very small again.

‘Am I supposed to give out Hail Marys and Our Fathers now?’

‘Just directions.’

She jumped as the engine started.

‘It’s nearly three. We’d better pick your lad up.’

14

Ronnie was baffled to find the stud deserted like the Marie Celeste, no response to her shouts as she marched round under the watchful eye of maternal mares and surprisingly companionable-looking stallions. The yards were immaculate but unmanned.

She started emptying the car boot, crammed full of credit card-bought groceries to indulge her grandson, tempt her daughter to eat, and explore the wonderful world of soya protein for Luca. Determined to pull family and team together, she sensed the place to start was around the kitchen table in the shadow of her mother. Picking out a Kinder egg, she thought ruefully of her plan to enlist her grandson’s help to unpack the shopping – ‘There’s something for you in one of these bags!’ – while Pax and Luca, talking horse, nursed steaming mugs of tea, bonding over the big box of biscuits she now rammed on a larder shelf. If an army marched on its stomach, it needed to stick around the mess long enough to eat.

Where are you? she texted Luca, then huffed as the No Service warning flashed up on her phone.

Had they argued again?

She went back outside to try to find some signal.

The sight of her horsebox compounded her disappointment. How could she miss Blair’s visit? So typical of him to blow in and out like a storm. The lorry cab, which had been left open with the keys in the ignition, still smelled of him. Climbing in, she curled her feet up onto the seat beneath her, dogs settling alongside as she looked out from her high vantage point across the raised paddocks to the village and vale, never failing to love the view, yet wishing she shared it more often with company that had two legs rather than four. Preferably two familiar, rock-hard hairy ones with high tech metal plates holding one femur and one ankle bone together and a small, faded tattoo of a wallaby on the left buttock dating back to 1986.