‘Mumma!’ yelled Fergus, bursting from the living room and barrelling towards her. He threw his arms around her legs, pressing his face against her jeans, and she reached down to stroke his curly head, comforted by his presence. Four years old, Fergus was a chunky little thing, with his stocky barrel-chest and the most squeezable thighs of any small person, plus a mop of black ringlety hair that framed his beaming, chubby face.

‘Help! Don’t pull me over,’ she cried, laughing and almost losing her balance as she bent down to hug him. Her dear little boy with his naughty, gurgling chuckle and tight-gripping arms now clasped around her neck, it was exactly what she needed. ‘I missed you,’ she told him, snuggling against him.

‘A lot? A big lot?’

‘Oh, a big, big lot. The biggest, most enormous lot there ever ever was!’

Seeming satisfied with this answer he gave her a wet kiss on the cheek, wiggled out of her grasp, then charged back down the hall. ‘Daddy! It’s Mumma,’ he proclaimed joyfully just as Craig emerged from the room.

‘Hey,’ he said, eyes scanning her expression, trying to read her mood. ‘Welcome home. Are you okay? How did it go?’

She leaned against him as he embraced her. They’d been together three years and he was kind, good and solid, everything that your loved one should be. ‘I’m okay,’ she replied. That much at least was true. She was alive, breathing, still in one piece. Then she sighed, because he was waiting for the rest of the story and it was going to be painful to get it out. ‘It wasn’t exactly what I was hoping for,’ she admitted eventually.

‘Oh, love,’ he said, stroking her hair, just as she’d stroked Fergus’s.

‘I just . . . I think I blew it. You were right, I shouldn’t have gone steaming in there unannounced. I picked pretty much the worst possible time, as it happens.’ There was a lump in her throat. Craig was only ever going to be on her side, but it was hard to confess to anyone that you’d been rejected. That you’d made a fool of yourself.

‘I set up the TRAINS, Mumma. I set up the TRAINS!’ Fergus was back, seizing her hand triumphantly, trying to pull her along the hall to their small living room, which, at any given time, felt like it was eighty per cent train set.

‘Cool!’ Frankie cried, allowing herself to be hauled forward to bear witness to his latest feat of engineering. Fergus was big on trains. Also dinosaurs, space, zoo animals, the dustbin lorry, squirrels and water pistols, but his heart beat with most passion when it came to trains.