She wanted to tell him about Sammi Manning, the teenager she feared had been snatched and held against her will by a sick monster. It occurred to Sasha that she hadn’t even spoken to him about the disastrous press conference. There was a time when Kev would have been the first person she’d have talked to in the aftermath. In her shock and embarrassment, she would have needed to get her bearings, and he had always been her compass, nobody else would do. The old Kev would have said exactly the right thing to make her feel better, he would have done everything in his power to lift her, to reassure her she hadn’t made an almighty cock-up. But – and this was the worst thing – it never even crossed her mind to call him about it, and that broke her heart.

His focus drifted back to the television. ‘I’ve been shattered recently, there’s lots of shit going on at work.’

She walked in front of the TV, trying to ignore the forced laughter of the studio audience behind her, to force him to meet her gaze.

‘Things will sort themselves out soon. I’ll be better tomorrow, I’ll… Let’s talk then.’

‘You say that every day, you say we’ll talk about whatever it is that’s going on, and it never happens. We’re like ships in the night, Kev. Not just you and me, but Angel and Denny, too. Our family feels like it’s falling apart, and we’ve got to fix it, all of us.’ His refusal to engage with her was infuriating. ‘Have you at least apologized to Nelson after what happened yesterday?’

‘Why would I do that?’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Sasha said, annoyed. ‘Because you’re a grown man, because it’s the right thing to do. You totally over-reacted, you know that, right?’

‘When has he ever apologized to us about anything?’

‘I don’t care what Nelson does.’ Putting him on the spot was getting her nowhere, so she tried to appeal to the social Kev of old. ‘Tell you what, if things aren’t so great at work, why don’t you invite some of your colleagues over?’

Time was – she was clinging to the past again – they used to love having dinners and parties, and the house seemed full of people every weekend. Kev was the King of the Castle, the life and soul.

But that was before what happened to Jake.

Since their youngest had died, a lot of things had changed. A lot of old behaviours, the glue that bound them together, were gone. Invisible threads had been pulled; the dark matter that kept her and Kev in orbit around each other had somehow loosened, and she was terrified that they were drifting apart.