Hello, Heathrow, my old friend.

For a moment, you stand there, in the crowd, breathing as one.

Sir, madam, this way, please, a uniformed woman is saying, families this way, and she’s sliding open a barrier tape so that you can pass into the Family & Special Assistance lane.

He smiles at you, and you smile back.

Thank you, you say to the uniformed woman.

As you manoeuvre the buggy around and join the other lane, which doesn’t seem to be moving any faster, perhaps even slower, he murmurs in your ear, Though whether this is a help or a disincentive for travelling as a family, time alone shall tell.

You pass through Immigration as a family, through Baggage Reclaim, and pause before the sliding doors of the Arrivals hall, where your husband will be meeting you and Tilly: he’s timed his flight back from Cape Town to coincide with yours.

So I guess this is it, he says. Are you going to be ok?

Yes, you say, because what else can you possibly say?

And you take the handle of your suitcase from him, and you walk, not a family at all but two entirely separate 129people now, through the final Customs channel; Nothing to Declare.

Your husband isn’t there.

You find a power socket and plug in your phone. A series of messages: he’s been further delayed in Cape Town, the assistant producer couldn’t handle it after all, the dancer who’s broken her ankle, the problem with insurance, the sequence that needs to be reshot. He had to turn back halfway to the airport to deal with it all. He’s not now going to be home until tomorrow, or maybe the next day, he won’t know until tonight. He’s going to make it up to you. Love to Tilly. Tell her he’s got the biggest present for her. Take a cab!

You knew it, you thought. Even as he was texting you as you boarded the flight in Toronto, saying he was on his way to the airport too, you knew and dreaded this.

You hold down the button until your phone goes dark again.

He stays with the buggy and bags and the charging phone while you go, Tilly grizzling on your hip, to rinse out the bottle in a sink in the loos then beg some warm milk from the Costa. You could do with a coffee yourself, and should have offered to get him one, but you don’t have enough hands. You think of your mother: her jokes about needing a spare pair of hands, her claim to have eyes in the back of 130her head that you and your cousin once combed her hair repeatedly to disprove. Your mother would have been younger than you are now. You and your cousin just a handful of years from your daughter.

It goes, all of it, and then it’s just – gone.