‘The tortoise was an accident.’

‘You don’t put a tortoise in the microwave by accident.’

‘You do if you’re five years old and think it’s hibernating because it’s cold,’ Tom said irritably. ‘Stop looking for something that isn’t there, Millie. Our kids are perfectly normal. They’re just kids.’

He stuck to his see-no-evil stance even when the rabbit ‘escaped’ from its hutch that night and climbed into the dishwasher and ran the steam-and-sanitise cycle all by itself.

He maintained it the following year when the little boy next door nearly lost his finger in a garden gate that mysteriously jammed shut, insisting it was just another unfortunate accident.

But even Tom can’t hide from the truth now.

The only reason we’re not planning a funeral is because the magnolia tree beneath the hall window broke what would have been a fatal fall.

We won’t always get this lucky.

It’s just a question of time.

chapter 18

tom

I hold my daughter’s hand under the blanket as the ambulance races to the hospital, sirens blaring. I can’t forget Peter’s face as the paramedics loaded his sister onto the stretcher. Practically salivating.

Meddie is very much my wife’s child, made in her image: cool, unemotional, self-contained. But Peter was supposed to be mine. I gave him a straightforward name, an ordinary boy’s name for the ordinary boy I’d longed for: tousled and tow-haired, all scraped knees and conkers and smelly socks, a sunny-natured ally in a hitherto all-female household.

He was an easy baby: he slept well and rarely cried. He grew into an affable, good-natured child. That open, sunny smile, the dishevelled mop of hair like macaroni curls, the freckles and the wide-eyed, innocent gaze: the little boy I’d always dreamed of having.

On the outside.

I’ll never admit it to a living soul, but there’s something about our son that gives me the creeps. Even when he was a baby, I didn’t warm to him the way I did to Meddie. He has my wife’s eyes: the same shape, the same rich amber flecked with green, but they lack their mother’s … I don’t know, I’m not good with words – aliveness, maybe? Millie’s eyes change with her mood, from warm honey to cold coffee, her emotions scudding across the surface like clouds in the sky. Peter’s eyes are flawed stones, absorbing the light instead of sparkling it back at you. There’s a deadness to them, a flatness, like the eyes of a shark.

What kind of father thinks like that about his own kid? I feel guilty about it every day. I’ve done my best to get past it. Bent over backwards, in fact: I’ve always been the first to defend him – that business with the school rabbit, for example. I told Millie she was being paranoid. Peter was six.