Paula Ellis paused by the window on the first floor of her home and looked outside. Leaves carpeted the tree-lined avenue, the street a kaleidoscope of red and gold. Yellow rose bushes bordered perfectly manicured front lawns. The flowers were thinning out now, their duty done for the summer, but no wilted brown petals littered the grass. Here in suburban heaven, everything was crisp and clean. With a smile, she pulled up the sash and leaned out, breathing deeply.

Autumn. Changes. It was the time of year when Paula always felt the potential for transformation.

She put down the pile of clean washing she had carried upstairs and sat on the windowsill, deep in thought. It was invariably during October that Paula and her husband, Tommy, would begin talking about making alterations in their home life. She imagined finally getting a dog, the same dog they had been talking about for the previous four autumns as the evenings drew in. Somehow, the cold blue sky and the piles of leaves made it easy to imagine them wrapping up and taking family walks in the countryside that bordered their Essex home. Often, the talk would then turn from a puppy to a baby. The conversation was always started and led by Paula, with her pointing out that if they were going to do it, then it should be soon. After all, they were both thirty-five, and Paula didn’t want to be a forty-plus-year-old mum at the school gates.

Tommy’s face, open and eager when the talk had been of a dog, would shut down. Usually they would then argue. Or he would. She would sit there on the lovely three-piece suite, her head nodding lower and lower, until he had patiently explained all the reasons why it wasn’t a good time.

He’d had a lot of reasons to hesitate, the last four years of ‘new changes, new life’ conversations. He was moving on up in his workplace, having started at the bottom as a foreign exchange junior back when he graduated. He ticked off every box every year, and the rewards came in annually: a car for each of them, Paula finally able to quit her job and practise becoming a stay-at-home mum. Two years ago had come the biggest bonus so far: the five-bedroom, three-storey town house in the new Wickford development of Riverside. Views of the River Crouch out the back, meadows and wooded areas at the front, and just a forty-minute commute to London for Tommy. It was perfect. It was a home too big for two, and Paula had moved in with a sense of positivity and hope for the future.