The bed squeaks beneath me as I sit down next to him. ‘No. You should go. And don’t feel guilty.’

‘I do though.’ They’re just three words but they’re so laden with pain and sorrow he seems to bow under their weight.

‘You need to go to work. We need to keep this house.’

‘You’re more important than this house. Jake’s more important than this house.’ His voice cracks as he says his son’s name and I wrap my arms around him.

‘I feel so awful,’ I say as I press my face into the crook of his neck. ‘I screamed at him like a banshee.’

‘You were standing up for me. You’ve never done that before.’

I twist in his arms so I can see his face. ‘Haven’t I?’

He shakes his head. The sadness in his eyes is more than I can bear.

‘I’m so sorry.’

‘You put the kids first – that’s the way it should be.’

‘No.’ I shake my head. ‘It’s not. We should have been a team. I should have supported you.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’ He brushes a strand of hair out of my eyes. ‘At least we’re talking again. Properly talking, I mean.’

‘Mark.’ I pull away, the tiniest bit. ‘I need to talk to you about Stephen.’

He stiffens. ‘What about him?’

‘I’m finished at Wilkinson & Son. I haven’t told him yet. Not officially.’

Mark leans forward and tugs on the zip of his overnight bag, even though it’s already shut. ‘Right.’

‘Don’t you want to know why?’

‘Not really.’ He gives me a long searching look and my cheeks flush warm. He knows I’m hiding something but, like me, he doesn’t want any more arguments. This is the closest we’ve been in months and neither of us wants to shatter our fragile truce. ‘So what do you think you’ll do now? Get another job or wait until after DS Forbes gets back to us with—’

A knock at the bedroom door interrupts him.

‘Yes?’

The door opens slowly, revealing Jake in the doorway with the landline phone in his hand. He shifts his weight from one foot to the other.

‘I rang Ian,’ he says, looking directly at me. ‘I’m going in later this week. I rang Kira too. She’s sleeping on Amy’s floor tonight. I said I’d pick her up in the morning.’

He looks so broken, so contrite, so deeply ashamed that my heart twists in my chest. One of my sons is missing and the other is falling apart in front of my eyes. I have never felt so powerless or so impotent in my life.