He pulls his shirt on, climbs the buttons with his fingers. I adjust his collar, find it still warm from the iron. A smile now. Pale brown eyes that catch the light. And those dimples bracketing his mouth deepen, almost too charming for his weathered, rugged face. I think about the app again. Stay the course, I tell myself.

‘You set for work later?’ he asks.

‘Yep, I’ve got my uniform in the car.’ Nerves crest beneath my sternum; I push back against the feeling. He can’t complain about me picking up shifts, his recklessness is partly to blame for putting us in a financial hole. Our monthly repayments on the credit card barely cover the interest, let alone pay off the debt.

We are heading about twenty-five minutes south-east of the CBD, an area full of big two-storey places whose residents all work in the city and whose yards are full of harmless dogs: labradors or collies.

Cain steers through the streets to the motorway heading south and soon we are rolling along the tree-lined streets. I’m grateful he’s driving; I spend half my day behind the wheel – people think an ambulance officer’s job is performing CPR and administering EpiPens when really we spend much more time navigating traffic and waiting in car parks for our next call.

I should have taken something, a Valium maybe. For the first time in months, I crave a drink. It’s like I can taste an earthy red on my tongue.

‘Knock, knock,’ I call through the screen door when we arrive. ‘Hello.’

‘Come in,’ Axel’s deep voice calls. ‘It’s unlocked.’ We walk through to the living room, white walls, pale timber floorboards. They bought this place a few years ago and it’s much bigger than our rental. A show home; it barely looks lived in at all.

‘Hello, lovelies,’ Claire says, striding to Cain first for a hug. ‘Jesus, you need to chill on the bench press.’

‘Tell me about it,’ I say.

Taj, their twelve-year-old beagle, is at her heels.

Claire hugs me, kisses the air beside my cheek. She calls herself the yogoth – she has bottle-black hair, shellacked nails and tattoos, and owns her own yoga studio in the city. I’ve gone along once or twice; I always feel good afterwards but horribly inflexible during.

‘I love your hair,’ she says. ‘Very short, very chic.’ She might as well be complimenting her own hair, which is shorter, darker and undeniably more chic. But I appreciate it. Claire is one of the good ones. We’d caught up for wine a few times when the boys were away. We’d joked about getting matching tattoos: WW, war wives. It was nice to have a confidante, someone I could talk to about what Cain did, other than the dismissive, ‘He’s in the army.’