Charlie is sluggish today; I have to tell him three times to get up. The third time I go into his room, he’s sitting slumped on the edge of his bed, loose-limbed, his eyelids drooping.

‘I’m tired,’ he complains. ‘My head is all heavy.’

He goes to lie back down, but I catch his arm, pulling him back upright. The breakfast that I pushed down – a single slice of toast with Marmite – sits in a lump under my ribs. ‘We’re going to be late,’ I tell him. ‘Stop messing about.’

And still he flops about in my arms as I tug off his pyjamas, setting more of my anxious thoughts racing, so that I have to fight to cage them away.

He looks chilly without any clothes on though, and maybe the cold wakes him up a bit as he looks more alert. ‘Come on,’ I say, ‘you can dress yourself now,’ and he sighs – a put-on, theatrical gesture – and fetches his trousers from the drawer, getting going at last. But over breakfast his conversation is stilted, there are gaps between his words, as though he can’t fish out the ones he wants.

‘I need my pencil-thing,’ he says. ‘I need my … stamp … my stickers.’

These are things my brain registers, signs my mind is desperate to log, but I refuse, this time, to read anything into it. He’s a child, I repeat to myself, and all children struggle at times. I chivvy him along, taking his half-finished bowl of cereal off him and helping push his arms into his coat, making up valuable time.

At the school gates, we join the back of the crowd and I make sure he has his backpack on straight and kiss him on the cheek, wondering whether he’s too old for that now, whether it’s strange, no longer appropriate. Just as the teacher appears to usher the children in, a girl and her mother come hurrying up, running late. Charlie waves and calls out ‘Molly!’

So now I can put a face to the name. Molly’s mother looks nice, kind and friendly, and she catches my eye with a lopsided smile, a mum-to-mum moment but one that I’m too anxious to respond to properly. Something that should be so easy to do. Flustered, I busy myself instead with stiffly shooing Charlie inside and just give a stupid, awkward wave to Molly’s mother as I rush away, keen to get to work, but really wishing I had said something about the party invite and told her then and there that we’d come.