Hands were yanking me away then and I was bellowing, ‘Anya, Anya,’ over and over again, the pain something I won’t be able to describe, ever. I was crying and shouting, clawing at my own skin as though trying to escape from being me.

And then gentle but firm hands were taking Olivia from me and saying, ‘It’s over, Elliott. It’s over. Let’s go.’

SPRING 2021

IRENE

Irene checks her suitcase for probably the tenth time that morning, then her handbag to make sure she has her tickets and passport.

She isn’t being picked up by Frank for another half an hour for the journey to Heathrow. Irene takes a Rennie from the peeling packet in the bottom of her handbag in an attempt to quell the nerves fluttering in her stomach.

It is such a long way. She can’t even pronounce the name of the airport in Bangkok – Suvarnabhumi. How on earth is she going to cope if people don’t speak English? And what about all that spicy food? She liked the unusual new things that Liam cooked her on his last visit, but they had given her awful indigestion afterwards.

Irene looks at her watch. Twenty minutes until Frank gets here. He is always on time.

She wishes now she hadn’t turned down his offer to come with her to Thailand. But maybe next time. Everything is still so new. Having her son back in her life is a blessing she thanks God for every single day – now she has decided to give God a second chance. Having a new friend in the form of Frank is lovely too, but she doesn’t want to rush anything, after all.

When Liam had been in the hospital, stabbed in the stomach by that woman whose name she still can’t bring herself to say, she thought she might lose him again. It felt like the cruellest, most unfair joke that the world could play on a person, to bring him back into her life and take him away again. But the wound had been ‘quite superficial’ the doctor explained to her. He was smiling gently as he said it, and Irene had been struck by the difference in doctors, after Michael, when the news was good.

Her eyes flick to the mantelpiece and she looks at the pictures of her boys from a lifetime ago. She blinks back tears as she thinks about the sacrifice Michael made in trying to find his brother. This is something she knows still haunts Liam. She held him when he cried and told her he was so sorry for staying away all that time.

But it is what it is, and they must make the most of what they have now.