‘You said, in France, that you’d leave once the girls had left home. Is that still what you intend to do?’

He was so tired. Too tired to deal with this on top of everything else. And yet, he felt the night had brought them closer together, and that she deserved some honesty from him.

‘I don’t know,’ he told her. ‘I thought that was what I wanted, but now I’m not sure. When I said that, in France, I was struggling with the feeling that I couldn’t hold things together. It’s like I was constantly straining to keep together something that naturally wanted to come apart.’

‘And now?’

‘Now, I just want to pick up the pieces. To stitch this family back together. To care for it, protect it, nurture it.’

He spoke softly, tenderly, in a way he hadn’t spoken in years. They held hands across the table and even though something had been shattered that night, it felt like a tiny chink of light, of hope within the gloom.

32

It was easily done. The pregnancy test slipped into an envelope. In the dead of night, she posted it through the letterbox then crept away.

Eva stared at her reflection in the mirror by her bed. Her face looked puffy and pale like dough pounded into the bottom of a bowl. She hadn’t brushed her hair and it fell dishevelled around her shoulders. Her room, normally monastic in its tidiness, was swept with a new chaos: books and lecture notes were spread in disarray on her desk where she was supposed to be studying, bags and shoes and clothes strewn across the floor. The bedclothes were still mussed, her duvet a nest at the centre, even though it was almost midday. Her exams were at the end of the month, but after an hour or so of staring blankly at the pages of the books she’d borrowed from the college library, re-reading the same paragraphs over and over, the words blurring out of focus, Eva had given up, succumbing to the draw of her bed.

All morning, there were doors slamming, phones ringing, the drone of her parents’ voices conversing downstairs. Corinne and Beth had gone out, and shortly after their departure, there was the familiar sound of her father’s bicycle wheels shushing through the gravel driveway. Looking out her window, Eva had seen him clad in his Lycra, one leg swinging over the saddle as he pushed away for his Sunday morning outing.