Ben wasn’t born here, we arrived soon after I realised the life I had been building with the man I thought I would spend the rest of my days with and I would raise my boy with, left me. Rory and I had originally lived together in a beautiful semi-detached house in a small village. But when he left, never knowing about Ben, I knew I could never raise my son there. Every crook and creak of that house bore a memory of Rory. And after he left me for good, I was practically walking around with my eyes shut and my hands firmly over my ears to avoid any reminders of him.

I remember the last day I spent in that house. The day I packed everything up and walked away for the last time with my son in tow. I was scared out of my mind. My heart didn’t stop racing until I reached the beach house. For all the use my father was to me as a child, despite the lack of love he showed, when his useless cold heart packed up for good I inherited the beach house. I was under no illusions that it was an act of love, more practicality. There was no one else. Of course it would be handed down to me. It’s just the way things were done.

I had loved Ben with such ferocity. I had mopped his brow and lain next to his bed through his high temperatures. But there was always the chance that one day he would leave me so callously, it was in his blood. He was his father’s son.

As a child, Ben would ask the usual questions about life. Why is the sky blue? How do you get a rainbow? Can dogs laugh? He always accepted what was what. How I told him things. I enjoyed that power I had over him back then, the way he would hang on my every word. But as he grew, sentences like ‘because I said so’ were no longer accepted. He began to look at me differently. That look of determination grew stronger every day. I ached for the days of innocence where I could put my son to bed and know that he was going to sleep under the influence of whatever he had been told that day. Those days had slipped away too easily and the thing that was making me the angriest was that I hadn’t even realised the enormity of it, until now. It was as though it was all for nothing.

It was Daisy’s influence that had thrust him even more towards the world around him; towards the places that I didn’t want him to go.

Ben had become independent. I should have felt proud, but instead all I felt was a twisted bitter hatred at the world that he had been taken from me, when I was the one who put in all the work, amongst all the threat and uncertainty.