To distract herself she turned to a clean page and began to sketch him. The velvet-haired baby; the rampaging toddler; the gangly adolescent with a mop of curly brown hair. She found it harder to sketch him as he was now. The nuances of his face kept eluding her: sometimes grinning and guileless, at others withdrawn, unfamiliar. She’d experienced something like grief even before he’d left, feeling him pulling away, their relationship fraying. That was why she’d caused such a scene outside her shop on the day he’d dropped his bombshell. She winced as she remembered half the street looking on, Zeb walking away shaking his head, like he was ashamed of her.

Her hand stilled as an image popped into her mind. A sketch, but not one of hers. She leaped up and went to Zeb’s room, where the scent of aftershave and musty maleness lingered. She hadn’t stored any stock there in case it jinxed his return. Some of his clothes still hung in the wardrobe, band T-shirts and black jeans: a reason to hope, or an indication he’d left in a hurry? Emma imagined Steph sitting in Freya’s room, gazing at her things, her teenage life. The shock of finding unexpected photos.

She took Zeb’s sketchbook from his drawer. The well-being officer at his college had suggested he use his love of drawing to help with his “anger issues.” Emma still became dry-mouthed when she thought about that phrase, so at odds with the baby Zeb she’d been sketching. It was probably temporary, his tutors had told her. A response to stress, to becoming an adult. And didn’t Emma know how hard that could be?

Zeb mostly used charcoal, giving his drawings a dark smokiness. Emma turned the crisp pages, drinking in the skillful pictures she’d studied many times in his absence. She flipped past a hand with fingers curling into a fist. A jacket caught on a bush, its sleeve torn, the shrub starred with flowers and thorns.

Eventually she reached what she was looking for today. The drawing was larger than the others, and he’d filled in the backdrop with dense strokes, so the figure in the foreground rose off the page. It was a girl of around Zeb’s age, sitting on the edge of what looked like a merry-go-round in a playground. She had a pale ponytail and wore a sweater and leggings, slim arms stretched above her head. Zeb hadn’t drawn her face in much detail, only closed eyes and the smudge of a mouth, but she was suddenly so familiar that Emma’s heart skipped.