Zipping her duvet coat tighter, she took her mobile up to the tower above the far arch. The wind had dropped, stars thrown out in a wintry canopy, Orion overseeing them all, reminding her of Johnny again, her original huntsman.

‘I’m so mad at you for not calling first,’ she told Blair.

‘I called on you.’ He was on hands-free; she could hear the sat nav telling him to turn right. ‘We hate phones, you and me.’

‘Rubbish. You were texting mistresses when mobiles were the size of shoeboxes. You just feel guilty because you pin-hooked my mare. Please tell me Bay paid far too much for her.’

‘A fortune; I owe you commission.’

‘Good. I’m broke. How soon can I have it?’

‘Give me two hours.’

It was that simple.

15

Exhausted from his first day back at school, Ellis fell asleep midway through the storybook Carly was reading to him, his ’Splorer Stick under one arm, Pricey the lurcher stretched out beside him. Next door, she could hear Ash still telling one of the three little pigs that he would huff and puff and blow their house down, his voice animated, the good mood sticking. Yawning, she stretched the cricks out of her shoulders as she padded though to join him, remembering Flynn telling her that all farriers had bad backs. Cleaners suffered the same fate.

Ash’s back was a wide triangle of well-honed, massaged perfection, its landmines of tension and jumping nerves down to poor sleep rather than occupational hazards nowadays. He could still fight a war, but he lost the battle with insomnia night after night.

She ran her hands along its familiar rock face, warm as granite baked by the sun, moving on to kiss Jackson, standing up in his cot with his hands braced on the rail like a tourist on a hotel balcony, laying him back down. Sienna was sleepy-eyed in her toddler bed, snuffly with a cold that moistened her top lip. Carly carefully kissed around it.

She tried not to think back on that wet, snotty slick when Ash cornered her on the landing straight afterwards with a demanding kiss of his own, already primed for action. ‘You owe me one, bae.’

Since when was sex a debt, she wondered, her stomach rumbling. ‘Let’s wait for the kids to settle. We need to eat.’

Some nights, seduction came easily, a passive sacrifice to her body loving his, but tonight Carly felt uneasy. Her brain was too busy downloading the day to feel horny just yet. Two new jobs. She wanted to share her good news on social media, to take a boost from the likes, to know Ash was really okay about it all.

‘It’s exciting, Ash,’ she told him over tea, his food disappearing a fast as hers went cold. ‘They give me choices.’

‘Yeah,’ he fed her a chip, ‘like whether to tidy up after someone else’s kids or shovel shit. How mad was Janine when you told her?’