Jeanie felt her own smile waver for just a single moment as she considered the possibility of Luis seeing them both later on, maybe even giving her a meaningful look across the restaurant, a telltale raised eyebrow or, worse, a disparaging smirk. Well, if he did, she’d just have to deal with the consequences, she thought; accept it as the price she had to pay. She had made her own bed, as her mother used to say, and she would lie in it. With Harry, not Luis.

‘Yes, please,’ she replied. ‘A table for two would be lovely.’

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-One

It was midday on Friday, and Frankie and Craig were walking down the street towards Fergus’s playgroup. Now the princely age of four, he would be starting at the local infant school come September, and this was the final day of term for the playgroup and therefore the last ever session that Fergus and his cohort would attend. To mark the occasion, all the parents had been invited to share a special celebration lunch with their offspring – their ‘graduation’, the staff were calling it, tongue-in-cheek. The children were apparently making their own graduation hats out of colourful paper that morning, which they would all be wearing as the parents arrived. Frankie was already feeling tearful at the prospect. She was going to miss, terribly, these easy-going playgroup mornings, where Fergus made things and played and sang songs with his friends, where he’d had so much fun. Next stop: school, where he’d be squeezed into a uniform like all the other boys and girls, where he’d have to sit still and pay attention, where the playing would be measured into educational boxes that the teachers needed to tick off.

She found herself sniffling as they rounded the corner and walked the last few steps towards the church hall where the playgroup was based. ‘I feel so emotional!’ she cried with a little laugh, putting a hand to her heart. ‘I can’t believe this chapter in his life is about to end. I’m not sure I’m ready for it yet.’ She’d grown so fond of the staff there – substitute mothers, all of them – and the other mums of the children as well; she was going to have to readjust to the new world of infant school almost as much as Fergus would.

Before Craig could answer, though, his phone rang and he pulled it from his pocket. ‘Oh – I’d better take this,’ he said, glancing at the screen. ‘It’s Lloyd.’

The name meant nothing to Frankie for a moment, too caught up in her sentimental feelings. Lloyd? Ah, their solicitor, she realized and wrinkled her nose, the mood puncturing at once. She had been twitchy and apprehensive ever since they’d gone to meet him, when Craig had effectively commanded that the dogs of war be unleashed on Julia. What would Julia’s answering salvo be?