‘We have all night.’

She laughs and looks at him and she can see that he means it. So she describes the scene on Christmas Day and how she’s left Trent. Saying it out loud feel liberating. All the confusion she felt earlier disappears, as she looks at Matteo’s face. Trent’s affair with Helen is despicable. Unforgiveable.

‘Ouch,’ he says, his thick eyebrows crinkling together. ‘That sounds painful.’

She nods, feeling unbidden tears stinging her nose. She swallows them down.

‘Thank you,’ she says.

‘To better times,’ he says, leaning across the balcony and clinking glasses with her. She feels a tear fall as the fireworks on the beach start. She laughs at the stupidity of her emotion. It’s embarrassing to cry in front of him.

‘Trent is a fool,’ Matteo says.

She nods and smiles. Someone at last. On her side.

14

Inner Superhero

Claire stands in her kitchen watching as the birds flit between the cherry tree and the fence, waiting for the kettle to boil. It’s a non-descript dismal day and the atmosphere at home hasn’t been great. She and Pim have not really patched things up after their row on New Year’s Eve about Jenna and Rob, and he’s retreated into a conveniently all-consuming ball of stress about his classes starting up again. She’s spent the last fortnight on her new January diet, but so far she’s yet to lose so much as a pound. She can feel the call of the chocolate brownies she’s double taped into a tin box in the cupboard, like an evil whisper.

Pim sits with his headphones on at the kitchen table. In fact, she’s entirely invisible to him, she realises. There’s a staff meeting going on and she hears him laugh.

She wonders, if things had turned out differently, whether she might have been a teacher herself. Then it might have been her having that easy camaraderie, her belonging to a team. Back in her twenties, she used to have a good job in a recruitment agency, but she gave it up when they moved to Brighton for Pim’s job and she was concentrating on getting pregnant. And then, when she had babies, they became her focus. She wanted to give her all to being a mum. But, now, all the good years have rushed by and she can’t help feeling that she has nothing to show for herself.

While she waits for the detox teabag to brew, she picks up her phone and scrolls through the Sea-Gals chat. She likes the clips that Helga posts of the starlings and the gulls. Their house where she grew up in Ireland was inland from the coast and they hardly ever visited the rugged beaches. Even so, she’s always thought of herself as a coastal kind of person. That’s why she and Pim had moved to Brighton.

But now, she marvels at how she’s lived by this huge other element for a decade and has really not taken much notice of it. How has she not known about the tides or the currents? How has she mostly ignored the sunsets and sunrises?