Yes, sensible, he told himself as Lewis trotted back up the lawn and ran past his legs into the warm house. Very sensible. Not cowardly at all.

ANNA STARED AT her phone as the screen went dark. The thought that she might be able to FaceTime with Brody at some point buoyed her up. He always made her feel better about things and it would be nice to see his smile one day and not just hear it.

She sighed, playing back their conversation as she stuffed her feet back into the slippers that were sitting on the carpet in front of the sofa.

She hadn’t realized it, but up until now, she’d been feeling guilty about turning Jeremy down. However, after talking to Brody, she felt much better about her decision. She wasn’t being selfish. She was doing the right thing. For Jeremy, too.

She yawned and covered her mouth with her hand, closing her eyes tight, and when she’d finished, she stretched, easing the kinks from her shoulders and back, from where she’d been curled up in the corner of her large squishy sofa. As she’d said to Brody, it was late, and she did feel tired, but now that she thought about it, she wasn’t sure she was sleepy. She always felt very peaceful, very relaxed, after talking to Brody, but she often felt energized too.

She picked up her phone again to check that her alarm for the morning was set and spotted the Facebook icon on her home screen. She avoided social media these days, but now and again she’d hop on to put little blue ‘thumbs up’ signs on posts from people she knew, who she hadn’t talked to in a while, and hadn’t seen for even longer. She opened the app and scrolled down her feed, slowing for pet pictures and caustic cartoons, but easing past smiling couples and pictures of babies a little faster.

That’s why she didn’t do this more often. Because what did she have to put up there? A lovely house, to be sure, but where were the people? Where were the smiles? She couldn’t imagine Gayle posing for a selfie with her after a Sunday lunch.

She was about to zip past a photo of a newborn baby, wrapped tight in a cream blanket, face pink and scrunched, when something made her pause, possibly the flicker of recognition of the name at the top of the post, even though she hadn’t consciously read it.

Oh, my goodness! It couldn’t be… She clicked on the photograph to enlarge it.

It certainly was. The picture had been uploaded by Scott Barry, and the caption underneath read: Taking our little man home from the hospital. It had been posted earlier in the week. But that was almost two weeks early! She’d only seen Scott and Teresa for May’s family lunch the Sunday before and there’d been no sign that Teresa was about to go into labour the next day, not that Anna really knew what the signs were.