‘Are you not even sorry?’

‘God!’ Trent explodes. ‘How many times do I have to say it?’

‘Once,’ she shouts back. ‘Once would be nice.’

‘I’ve been doing nothing else but saying sorry to you for the past twenty years,’ he rails. ‘I’ve never been good enough for you. Never enough.’

This feels horribly close to the bone. They haven’t ever really had the vocabulary to talk about their relationship. At the beginning, when they were young, they used to talk about ‘them’ as an interesting subject, checking in with each other’s feelings, making sure they were on the same page. But then they got married and they stopped having any kind of conversation about their relationship. She just assumed everything was OK. But she’d been kidding herself. Everything was not OK. Especially if he’s been feeling like this.

‘That’s not true,’ she says, because it isn’t. Of course it isn’t.

‘Yes, it bloody is.’ His voice really cracks now and she can see tears in his blazing eyes. She’s only seen Trent cry once, at his mum’s funeral, and she’s startled by this show of emotion.

He growls with frustration, embarrassed. He wipes his face and composes himself, the barrier suddenly drawn up, this brief glimpse into his inner psyche back behind steel doors. He steps away from her, his face making it completely apparent that the subject is closed. The tense silence between them stretches and she imagines all the conversations stalled and trapped in it.

‘I’ve got a valuation happening on Wednesday. Then it’ll go on the market by the end of the week.’

Her house is being sold by the end of the week?

‘The estate agent says he’ll get a good price. He’s juicing up some cash buyers from London. A place like this will shift straight away. The market’s boiling hot. If it was ever a good time to sell, it’s now.’

It’s typical of him to try and put a positive spin on this.

‘You can’t ice a turd, Trent,’ she snaps, firing a phrase that Jamie used to say back at him.

They both realise the significance straight away. Of the ghost of their son being in this moment.

‘And then what?’ Maddy asks, her voice husky. Her chest feels tight with an emotion she can’t name. It’s too raw. Too new. ‘We’ll be homeless. Homeless.’

‘This isn’t exactly a home, though, is it?’ he says, his eyes boring into hers. ‘It’s just your backdrop.’

He says it in such a sneery, nasty way, she thinks he must have felt like this all along. He’s made noises about supporting her, but he’s been resenting her this whole time. This beautiful home. That he’s had the benefit of living in.

‘That’s mean.’

‘But true. You just posted away to impress your friends.’

‘The friends you shagged,’ she snaps back.

‘Oh, here we go,’ he says, throwing up his arm. ‘I wondered how long it would take you to bring that up.’

‘That? Your affair with Helen, you mean? Your ongoing affair? I saw her, you know.’