He looked at me and smiled, and I smiled back. I didn’t love him just because he had a nice knee, was tall and made me laugh, but because we were two parts of one, and neither of us could imagine life without the other. I wish I had a better way to describe it, but I’m not a poet. Privately he was a husband and father to our three mostly wonderful kids, but professionally he was a writer. Unfortunately, despite winning the 1988 Armitage Shanks Fiction Award for Bad Sofa, a string of flops had left the relationship with his publisher a bit strained. So strained, in fact, that he was reduced to penning point-of-sale nonfiction classics such as The Little Book of Cute Pets That You Really Like to Hug and The Darndest Things Kids Say. When he wasn’t working on these, he was looking after our children and attempting to rekindle his career with a seriously good blockbuster—his magnum opus. It wasn’t easy, but it was what he loved, and I loved him, so we lived off my salary, which was about the size of Pickwick’s brain—not that big, and unlikely to become so.

“This is for you,” said Landen, pushing a small parcel wrapped in pink paper across the table.

“Sweetheart,” I said, really annoyed and really pleased all at the same time, “I don’t do birthdays.”

“I know,” he said without looking up, “so you’ll just have to humor me.”

I unwrapped the package to find a small silver locket and chain. I’m not a jewelry person, but I am a Landen person, so held my hair out of the way while he fastened the clasp, then thanked him and gave him a kiss, which he returned. And then, since he knew all about my abhorrence of birthdays, dropped the matter entirely.

“Is Friday up?”

“At this hour?”

Friday, it should be noted, was the eldest of our three children and the only boy. He was now sixteen, and instead of gearing himself up for a successful career with the time industry’s elite operatives known as the ChronoGuard, he was a tedious teenage cliché—grunting, sighing at any request no matter how small and staying in bed until past midday, then slouching around the house in a state of semiconsciousness that would do credit to a career zombie. We might not have known he was living with us if it weren’t for the grubby cereal bowls that mysteriously appeared in the vague vicinity of the sink, a muffled heavy metal beat from his bedroom that Landen was convinced kept the slugs from the garden and a succession of equally languid no-hopers who called at the door to mumble, “Is Friday at home?”—something that I couldn’t resist answering with, “It’s a matter of some conjecture.”