Certainty number three: Dean will always be awake before me, and he will be up and out for a walk before I’m dressed, so I will eat my breakfast alone.

For a few days now, there has been a fourth Certainty: the Travelodge breakfast features croissants. I’ve had to cross that one out, though, because today I came down and found there wasn’t a single croissant to be seen. Not one. There weren’t even any flakes on the pastry tray, which would have been a little confirmation that this is still Certain, that perhaps I’d just missed them this morning. But there was not a shred of evidence of croissantery.

It’s put a spanner in my breakfast works more than I really want to admit.

My routine was stable. I’d wake up to Dean pulling on his clothes. He’d say he’ll catch me in a bit, and he was off. I’d get dressed and come down here to the breakfast room. I’d pick up a croissant and an orange, and get myself a coffee from the machine. And I’d sit here and eat, pulling the croissant apart flake by flake, peeling the orange a scrape at a time, watching the subtitled news tick by on the TV until Dean came back.

The second morning we were here, I looked up and saw my own face staring back at me from the screen. Lottery-winning teens reported missing, a big red headline said. That put a bit of a spanner in the works too. I had to lean forward over my plate so my hair fell in my face, and hope that no one recognized me from the picture they’d chosen. They wouldn’t, I told myself; the photo was nearly a year old, and I’d grown my hair out a good few inches since then at least. Dean’s picture, however – an ID photo snapped in a photo booth, or perhaps a mugshot, I couldn’t quite tell – looked exactly like him. I prayed he wouldn’t come into the room while the segment was still on.

I also had to send a text: I’M FINE, MUM. I’M ALIVE. I’M WITH DEAN. And I blocked her number all over again.

It was a bigger spanner than today’s, but this pain au raisin I’m picking at is still bothering me, and not just because of my antipathy towards currants.

Breakfast is now an Uncertainty.

I could list all of the Uncertainties, but there are far too many to count. There aren’t enough fingers in the world to tick them off on. I don’t know how long we’ll be here, so that’s pretty Uncertain. I don’t know if we’ll move on or if we’ll go right back where we came from. I don’t know for sure where Dean goes in the mornings, and I don’t know if we’ll ever actually see the money, and to be honest with you I’m not even sure what my name is.

Perhaps I’ll keep Nicholas. Or I might keep on shortening it to Nicky. Or, and here’s the wild card, I might completely change it to Natasha.