She didn’t want that to happen. She had too much to lose – Dave and their home, his family, their friends, the tender shoots of happiness and hope that she had nurtured so carefully. The feeling that she was in the right place, with the right people, at last. She couldn’t let it all slip from her grasp. She mustn’t!

Not suitable, the manager at the New Age shop had said all those years ago. Bunny was starting to think she wasn’t suitable for anything. She’d failed at marriage. She was failing at being a girlfriend. She was even starting to fail at being slim, because she kept tucking into wine-laced carbonara, when it was one of the most fattening dinners out there. So should she call the whole thing quits, bail out and just leave while the going was good? Or should she risk blowing any future chance of happiness here by revealing herself to Dave – her true, ugly, shameful self – before somebody else did?

Craig had been predictably livid when he heard about Frankie’s encounter with Julia in the park, promptly ringing her solicitor and telling her that Julia could stuff her suggestions of mediation somewhere painful. Fergus, in contrast, took a while longer to respond to what had happened.

He was a deep thinker, Fergus, you could practically hear him tussling away with an idea sometimes, the cogs grinding. And, chatty as he was, with all his questions and observations and jokes, there were times when he nursed a worry to himself, when Frankie didn’t have a clue what he was thinking. What a funny lady, she had exclaimed brightly on the way back from the park, but he hadn’t really replied, just held her hand and walked beside her, jumping over cracks in the paving slabs, his blue trainers bright in the sunshine. Had he picked up on the peculiar tension between her and Julia? And what had his little-boy brain made of Julia’s extraordinary parting shot – I’m your real mummy? Should Frankie raise the subject with him or pretend it had never happened?

It was only later on that evening that she saw any manifestation of his feelings. Craig was bathing Fergus, and Frankie was putting away clean vests and T-shirts in his drawers, when she noticed that the teddy Julia had given Fergus had been fiercely stuffed head-down into the toy-box. ‘Oh dear,’ Frankie said as Fergus emerged pyjama-clad from the bathroom a few moments later, hair tousled and damp. ‘Teddy’s stuck. Help! I can’t get out,’ she added in a growly-bear voice for good measure, lifting one of the bear’s legs and waggling it around.

Fergus laughed, but only pushed harder at the teddy’s rounded bottom, wedging it further into the box. ‘He’s silly,’ he said scathingly and then flopped face-down onto his bed. ‘Who was that lady?’ he asked in a muffled voice.