‘You and me both. Payton has a friend over for a sleepover so they’re in her bedroom playing with makeup. And Saxon is where he always is these days—in his bedroom.’

‘Typical teenager,’ muttered Hayley.

‘But is he?’ I asked as we all sat down at the dining room table with our drinks. ‘I’ve barely seen him this week. He retreats into his room to do his homework the moment he comes home, emerges for about ten minutes for dinner and then disappears again. I’m worried he’s putting too much pressure on himself to achieve, or else he’s avoiding me because he’s angry at us. But of course when I try to talk to him about it, he tells me he’s fine.’

Wei chuckled. ‘If he’s doing homework, you should count yourself lucky. My parents had to bribe me to do anything school-related. Sadly, our home computer was in full view of everyone so I couldn’t look at porn.’

I shuddered, my hand freezing with the glass halfway to my mouth. The fact porn was even available on the internet when Wei was in high school showed just how young he was, but that wasn’t what worried me. ‘Oh my God. Do you think Saxon is spending so much time in his room because he’s looking at porn?’

At least when I was at school, the only porn the boys could access were copies of Playboy or Penthouse stolen from their dads. Now even worse porn was readily available at the click of their fingers, and I’d been to plenty of parenting talks preaching the dangers of such exposure.

Hayley laughed. ‘Don’t stress. This is Sax we’re talking about. The golden child. And even if he is looking at a bit of porn, it’s not the end of the world. There are worse things he could be doing. Let the poor boy be a teenager and tell me how you went at the counsellor the other day.’

I noticed Wei shifting in his seat—he probably didn’t want to be talking about either of these things and I didn’t blame him.

‘It was pretty useless,’ I confessed. ‘She thinks Adrian and I have drifted apart and that we need to reconnect emotionally so we can come together again on all levels, but the problem is Adrian is refusing to talk to me and the therapist didn’t give me any practical ideas for how to get him to listen.’

‘Hmm.’ Hayley took a sip of her wine. ‘Maybe you just need to give him more time. How’s he going with the kids when you aren’t here?’