‘Are you going to tell the police?’ he says.

Joe will remember the look she gives him for the rest of his life.

Joe storms into their small, square kitchen and starts opening the cupboards, feeling angry at Lydia and angry at Frannie. Most of all, he is angry at himself. Grisly, broken Joe, lashing out at the people he loves. Prioritizing people in the wrong way, losing his lovely wife.

Who does he think he is? He reaches up for a glass. It’s still warm from the dishwasher that Lydia must have put on. He brushes a hand across the buttons.

She’s left him. She’s left him. She’s left him.

He goes into their pantry, where they keep the stuff they hardly ever drink. It smells musty and damp. He leans his back against the wall, breathing, trying to talk himself down. He finds a whisky and pours it, even though it’s only ten o’clock. Whisky is for after-parties. For midnights. For early-on-New-Year’s-Days. And for … whatever this situation is.

Next door, he hears Cathy’s front door close, then two voices. He stands in the quiet of the kitchen, just listening, but can’t hear any more. He must be mistaken.

He sits at the kitchen table. On it are a couple of Lydia’s Yankee Candles, a clutch of sunflowers in a vase and a notebook. The washing machine has been set, ready to start in eleven hours’ time. She is so organized. She’d be a great mum. The greatest. He watches the green blinking light of the washing-machine timer. 11h 22m. 11h 21m. He stares and he sips.

When the washing machine flicks to 10h 59m, he pours another measure just as he hears a rustle at his front door, a soft knock perhaps. After a few seconds, somebody lets themselves in. It’ll be a member of his family, he thinks moodily, staring at the watermark his glass has left on the kitchen table.

Cathy appears, framed in the doorway. She’s in pyjamas. He gestures to her, and she pulls one of the wooden chairs across the floor tiles and sits down beside him, next to the radiator, laying an arm along it. She looks tired, he thinks, peering closely at her for once. He almost never does it: Frannie usually steals the limelight in every way.

Cathy’s face is scrubbed clean of make-up, still glowing with whatever moisturizer she’s used. Perhaps she didn’t intend to come here, maybe she decided on the spur of the moment. Something about it reminds him of their childhood. The intimacy of this, of seeing her in pyjamas, bare-faced, smelling of toothpaste.

‘This can’t go on,’ Cathy says simply. The baby hairs around her forehead are wet. ‘You know?’

‘I know. I know,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry – I lost … I lost my temper. I’ve been, I don’t know.’ He thinks of his father, and how far back they’d have to go to put this stuff right.

‘You’ve been what?’

Joe shrugs uncomfortably. ‘Struggling, I guess,’ he says in a low voice. Cathy stands and gets a glass out of the cupboard for herself. ‘Lydia left me,’ he says.