The gravity of his gesture hits me like a freight train, and I screw my face up as I turn to bury it fully in his lovely pec.

Stress has built this week, just as surely as exhaustion. I’ve had no outlet, no ability to fall apart. Not when I’m the sole adult present for Tabs. A heart operation is exhausting and terrifying, an enormous strain on not just her heart itself but on her whole body. She’s the brave one. She’s the one who’s had to put her life in strangers’ hands. She’s so full of courage that it blows me away.

I’ve been helpless to do much except be there for her.

Comfort her when she’s scared.

Distract her when she’s in pain.

Stay strong.

So no. Falling apart has not been an option, but it’s come at a hell of a price, because my entire head feels like it’s going to explode. I’m so full of unresolved stress and anguish and fear that my eyes and my sinuses ache with the tears I have not been able to shed for my little girl, the suffering I haven’t been able to take from her.

Something was always going to have to give.

Something was eventually going to push me over the edge.

And it’s this. The kindness of a man with whom I’m supposed to have a purely transactional relationship. The very fact that he is here, offering to help me carry this burden for as long as it takes.

I’ve been holding the vaguest appearance of sanity together with the emotional equivalent of a rusty old lock securing a dam, and Brendan’s unexpected acts of compassion have that lock giving up the ghost and the floodgates bursting open, obliterating every last drop of composure in spectacular style.

The tears aren’t decorous tears. I don’t sob prettily into his chest.

I bawl.

I wail.

I howl.

I actually keen.

I cry on Brendan like the world is ending, like I’ve lost everything there is to live for, which is ridiculous! Because Tabby’s had her lifesaving op, and she survived it! It’s as though my body hasn’t got that message, as though all of that embodied trauma of the past hours and days, years even, is making a break for freedom, as though my body has been a pressure cooker all this time and now, at the kindness of my boss, it’s completely unleashed.