‘What are you doing?’ Madison had followed me downstairs, still in her nightdress. I banged a bowl on to the table. She wasn’t allowed shop-bought cereal, so usually I cut up some fruit for her, but I didn’t have time. I took a banana from the bowl but got distracted and started looking again for the school address.

‘You’re weird,’ she sighed.

‘Madison, I need you to help me, please. I don’t know where your school is, and I’m supposed to drive you. You must know what it’s called?’

‘You should have asked Mommy.’

And where was Mommy? No sign of her. Yoga again, perhaps – Abby seemed to live at the gym. I was beginning to panic. From upstairs came the sound of Carson’s wails – he would need to be changed and fed soon. Oh God.

‘Madison, please.’

She made a face. It was an expression I’d never thought to see on the face of a child – sly, calculating. She knew the school’s address, I realised, or at least how to get there, but wasn’t telling me.

‘Madison!’ I snapped. ‘Stop this.’

A door opened, somewhere in the house. Madison whipped her head around towards it, then as footsteps came down the hall, she started to cry. It was as if she had pressed a button, and I remembered she was an actress, she could do that on demand. Oh please not Abby not Abby . . .

‘Something wrong?’

David came into the room. He was barefoot, in jeans and a T-shirt with some old band name on it, his hair rumpled. He looked not much older than me, though he was in fact twenty years my senior.

‘Oh! You’re here?’ Usually he left for work early, and I didn’t see him from one end of the day till the other.

Madison launched herself at his legs. ‘Daddy! She yelled at me.’

David glanced between us. ‘Did she?’

‘I’m sorry.’ I was on the verge of tears myself. ‘I have to take her to school and I don’t know where it is, plus I’ve never driven the car or on the right or . . . oh God, I have to get Carson.’

David detached himself from Madison, and came to me, and put his arm around me. I was shocked for a second by the heat of his body, in this frozen house, where I had not been touched since I arrived, except by Carson, who didn’t count.

‘Hey, it’s OK. I think we can sort that out. You get the baby up and I’ll drive you. Madison, why aren’t you dressed?’

She looked wrong-footed. ‘I didn’t have breakfast, Daddy.’

‘Well, you should have hurried up then. We’ll stop and pick up something.’

‘But Mommy says—’

‘I don’t see Mommy here, do you? Go.’

She went. I turned to him, and I was probably a little starry-eyed. My hero.