It’s for the best, he’d told me earlier. And deep down, dammit, I agreed.

So instead I sat there, my fists clenched, biting my tongue so hard I tasted blood as he explained to the kids how this separation would work. I’d thought my heart already smashed to smithereens, but it shattered even more as I watched my children come apart. Saxon’s face scrunched up—he was clearly trying not to cry but Payton sobbed like a baby.

I reached out and dragged her onto my lap. Suddenly I wasn’t sure if this frank conversation with all of us together was actually any better than the way I’d discovered my parents were separating—my mum’s hairdresser’s daughter delivering the news in the middle of the school playground.

Then again, was there any good way to find out your family was being ripped apart?

I’d give Adrian this though, he’d had it all worked out by the time he finally hit me with his decision. If I wasn’t so shocked and broken inside, I might have actually been impressed by how much he’d thought everything through, by all the research he’d done into various custody options.

He understood how traumatic my parents’ divorce had been for me, which was why he wanted to be open and upfront with our children.

He understood I probably felt angry and upset—no kidding—but had pleaded that I think of the children and try not to show or voice my fury around them.

He understood I’d hated being tossed from one parent to the other, one weekend to the next—thrown back and forth like an unwanted tennis ball—which was why he’d decided the nest-parenting model would be a good option for us.

‘Nest parenting?’ Saxon scoffed. ‘What kind of crap-arse term is that?’

‘Look, it doesn’t matter what it’s called,’ Adrian said, clearly trying to keep his cool at Saxon’s uncharacteristic outburst. ‘What matters is that this arrangement will be the least disruptive for you and Payton.’

‘And where are you and Mum going to live on your weeks off?’ Saxon made it sound like we’d be going on holidays, but everything about this felt like hell not paradise to me. The thought of not seeing my son and daughter every day, of being without them for a whole week at a time, was worse than any kind of physical torture anyone could have inflicted on me.

‘I’m going to be staying with Uncle Brad, and your mother …’ Adrian’s voice drifted off as he looked to me.

While he planned on living it up with his eternally single younger brother—they’d probably go clubbing every night like the teenagers they wished they were—he’d suggested I go stay with my mum or dad, which only proved how little he cared about me. I had no desire to move in with either of them. Not even temporarily.

Part of the appeal of getting married young was finally being able to leave both my parents, their selfish shenanigans and their games of playing me off against each other behind. A game they still weren’t above.