No! I wasn’t going to let him off the hook. This nest-parenting thing wasn’t going to work if we didn’t both keep up our side of the agreement, and maybe now we’d been doing it for over a month, I needed to remind him of the rules he’d laid on me. He would continue to pay the household bills, I’d still reply to all school communication, but we would share the cleaning and the shopping. Adrian might have hired someone to take care of the housework, he might even be managing to feed the kids veggies, but there was a lot more to running a household than just that. It was all the invisible things I did that kept things from falling apart.

I was going to have to talk to him.

The joy that I had a valid excuse to call my own husband again was short-lived. However I put it, I’d sound like a nag and that would merely give Adrian another reason not to want to be with me. I didn’t want to only talk to him when I had things to whinge or complain about, but he’d given me no choice. I had to take care of my children and if he insisted on this ridiculous custody arrangement, then I wasn’t going to pick up the slack for him. He needed to do his bit.

But first, dinner.

‘Finally,’ Payton said when we entered the kitchen. She was sitting at the table, one arm draped across it and her head resting on her arm. ‘I thought I was going to die of starvation.’

‘Thanks for waiting for us.’

‘Like I had any choice,’ she retorted, referring to my rule that we always sat down to dinner as a family. It wasn’t something I ever remembered happening at home when I was a child, but friends’ family dinners were some of my favourite memories of growing up. The food was usually much better than what Mum would cook and when I went to Dad’s house, we mostly got takeaway from Maccas. But even hot dogs at my friend Jane’s place—they were the only things her mum could cook—were had round the table with her whole family, everyone chatting about their days, laughing and sometimes commiserating as they ate.

I longed to one day have a family like that.

It wasn’t until I was about sixteen and I slept over at Hayley’s house and she complained about us not being allowed to take our dinner into the TV room to eat by ourselves that I heard her mum—now my mother-in-law—say, ‘Families that eat together stay together.’ It was the first time I’d ever heard that sentiment and it made so much sense. Maybe if my own parents had placed similar importance on sharing a meal together, my home life wouldn’t have been such a shambles.