Dan had been gone for less than five minutes, but when he came back with their drinks her face was white with distress. ‘What?’ he said. She pushed her phone across to him, and he read Michael’s words, then looked up at her. She waited for him to speak; she counted on his conviction.

‘Yeah,’ Dan said slowly. ‘I know this is tough to read, and he’s really suffering, but look, it’s early days, and everything’s so raw. The extraordinary will eventually become blessedly ordinary, and this storm will blow itself out.’

She nodded. She could cling to those words; his certainty could keep her afloat. But her breath had caught in her throat as she’d read Michael’s message, and she shuddered to think of him, in the small hours of the new day, unable to set his broken world back to rights. He’d written many emails to her since she left but he’d never before expressed his feelings so effectively, although their conversations in the days before she’d left Adelaide had been the most honest and open they’d ever had. He’d wanted to know why, if she’d been so unhappy, she’d waited this long to leave. Because, she said, it was possible to get addicted to a certain kind of sadness. Then he’d said all she was doing by leaving him for Dan Lawrence was exchanging one prop for another, and she hadn’t been able to refute this, except to say Dan had given her back a side of herself she’d long ago forgotten, and anyway, she’d said, wasn’t it true that Michael’s own feelings towards her were altered these days, and born of habit, not emotion? He’d been angry at this, had said she was entitled to decide she didn’t love him, but she didn’t get to decide he didn’t love her. That was just before she left the house, when he told her she didn’t know the meaning of love, and slammed the door, and this memory, she knew, would remain like a bad seed, planted deep in her mind.

She did know the meaning of love, she thought now. She did.

And yet, hadn’t her heart had a bad start? Certainly, Catherine hadn’t known what love meant, and doesn’t a child, on some fundamental level, observe the mother for the blueprint?

So.

Dan was watching her, seeing all the shadows of these thoughts pass over her face, and he knew he had strength for them both, and that he’d need it. She looked at him and said, ‘It’s just, every time I feel totally happy, I remember that soon there’ll be a phone call, a text, whatever, to remind me of the price we’re paying to be together.’