“Fine.”

“Where’s your dad?”

“He had to go somewhere.” She never asked where.

And he’d come home. An hour later. With the smell of Guinness on his breath and a bag of Liquorice Allsorts for me.

I never remember him apologizing. For anything. Not in words.

Bags of Liquorice Allsorts. That was his way.

The fact that I never liked Liquorice Allsorts was neither here nor there.

I glance at him in the back seat through the rearview mirror. I thought he’d be safer back there. He is asleep, his head at a sharp angle that will make his neck ache when he wakes up.

Still, he is asleep. That is good. I have time to think.

THINK.

I think about the motorway. The terrifying endlessness of it.

No, it’s only four hours to Zurich. That’s not endless. Four hours. On the motorway.

I breathe in. Hold it. Breathe out.

I think about the noise coming from the engine. An unfamiliar noise. It’s probably just the fried egg settling in the crack in the radiator.

I think about Brendan’s interview for his own job. About how he might be made redundant.

No, don’t think about that.

Although, he’s good in a crisis, Brendan.

And this is a crisis. For him. His job—his career—has been his radar. How he defines himself. Measures himself. Judges himself.

I get it, all of a sudden. Here, on the wrong side of a motorway in a foreign country.

I get it.

Because I’m being made redundant too, aren’t I?

I am a stay-at-home mother of two children who no longer stay at home.

Who are no longer children. I’m redundant.

And so might Brendan be.

Finally, we will have something in common.

I remember Brendan when Kate was born. Standing at the “business end” of the delivery suite as he called it. He was peering over the top of my knee, peering between my legs, and I was, for the most part, oblivious to his presence. I had been in labor for nearly twenty hours by then. And two weeks overdue.

Kate.

My Kate. By whom you could set a watch. For whom good timekeeping is a value she rates and employs.

Her birth was the only time she was late.

The baby’s heart rate had slowed. The midwife told me that. “Don’t worry,” she said then, perhaps realizing, too late, her mistake. Because when you tell a worrier not to worry, that’s when they start to worry. That’s if they haven’t already started.

So there I was, worrying and crying and shouting.

Brendan said afterwards he’d never heard me shouting before.

I don’t know what I shouted. I don’t remember. Probably best. Mother Nature’s Band-Aid.

And somewhere amongst all the worrying and the crying and the shouting, something caught my attention. Snagged on the part of me that was still aware of the outside world.

It was Brendan. His face. The look on it. It was...pure wonder.

“I see her, Terry,” he breathed and the wonder was there too, in his voice. “She’s so perfect.”