‘He’s depressed, is what he is.’

Ursula saying the D-word shocked Sasha, who had pussyfooted around the idea without ever daring to utter the word herself. Part of her expected Kev to snap out of his funk at any moment and – what, come to his senses? It was almost inconceivable that her happy-go-lucky husband could be depressed. Down in the dumps, yes, a little bit blue, under the weather, maybe even at a push… sad. But her mother was absolutely right, there was no other word to describe it. Kev was depressed, that’s exactly what he was.

And the truth jolted her, because Kev had always been the strong one, the cheerful one, the one who took life by the horns.

He’d helped her through the darkest days, when Jake died. When a driver lost control of his car while they were on a trip to London. Sasha had gone into a shop with Denny and Angel, one of those places where they sold fancy notebooks and stationery, while Kev waited outside with Jake because the damned buggy – which was the width of a lorry, and laden down with bags of shopping – wouldn’t fit through the door. She remembered touching the page of a diary, remembered still the pale, smooth pulp of the paper beneath her fingertips.

And the moment her hand lifted from that blank page, her life was changed.

She heard a crunch in the street, the ground judder, the buzzing vibration of the window, and then a single moment of ghastly silence before the other customers gasped. Outside, Kev roared in terror. Blood shrieked in her veins, and in that instant her DNA was for ever scrambled, rearranged.

A driver had lost control. His car mounted the pavement.

Something was lost. Her boy, her youngest.

And she was never the same person again. In those early days, she didn’t think she’d ever survive his loss. For weeks, she barely had the strength to move from the bed. She was gripped by a numbness, a paralysis. She couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat. She cried all the time. It hurt to open her eyes and to close them. The world was sluggish, drained of colour and energy. Her grief was a physical pain. She relived the agony he must have experienced again and again, it kept her awake long into the night and it was the first thing she imagined when she woke after a few hours of fitful sleep. Some days, all she wanted to do was curl into a ball and forget all the people who loved her, the people who needed her.