They’re at a play park twenty miles east. He’d hoped the drive would spark Aurelia back to life, bring back her smile, but if anything she’s grown darker and more sombre since they left the house. He’s got Coco in the baby carrier against his chest and she has slept most of the morning. He wonders if it would have been wiser to stay home, let Aurelia sleep instead of coming all the way out here. He feels like he’s walking on eggshells around her.

‘Come on, pudding,’ he tells Gaia, bringing the swing to an abrupt stop. ‘Let’s try out the climbing frame, shall we?’

Once Gaia runs off to the climbing frame he motions to Aurelia to sit with him and Coco on a park bench nearby. It’s a beautiful park, and a beautifully crisp day, for that matter. Cold, but not unbearable. Snow has whitened the hills in the distance and the trees at the park’s periphery, but the equipment has been kept dry by children enveloped in snowsuits and set loose after many days of being stuck indoors.

Aurelia sits down. He notices she keeps her distance. She is wrapped in a beige cashmere shawl, beneath which are the jogging bottoms she slept in last night and a white T-shirt bearing several stains. No bra, no make-up. Her face is pinched with cold and her eyes are glassy and swollen from tears. It’s like watching someone in freefall, but in slow motion, and with no actual falling – just the kind that seems to happen in all those interior spaces of the mind, the places he can’t access.

‘Great day, huh?’ he says, smiling benignly at her. She looks ahead. He nods over at Gaia who is playing with a couple of kids. ‘Glad we found this park, too. Looks like Gaia’s made friends already. We could set up some playdates. Be good for her to get some Scandinavian friends.’

Aurelia’s lips move. She’s speaking, but he can’t hear. He leans closer. Closer. She doesn’t flinch. All this time he’s kept his distance because he thought she’d leap away from him if he touched her, and he couldn’t handle being rejected. This thought winds up from the depths of his subconscious, and with it a memory of his father dropping him off at boarding school. Hands in his pockets. And how much that stung.

Very slowly, he puts an arm across her shoulders. She doesn’t move. He breathes a long sigh of relief. Happiness stirs in him. Maybe it’s not him that’s making her so sad. Maybe it’s something else.

‘I feel …’ she’s saying. He tilts his head towards her lips. She’s crying. Tears are sliding down her cheeks and she doesn’t swipe them away.

‘Aurelia …’ he says. ‘It’s OK.’