‘Why would he do that when he’s with you, Lucas? In Cambridge.’ Esther had sat up so quickly the room was spinning. The clumsy lunge for her mobile had knocked over her bedside glass of water and for a moment she was too sleep-befuddled to think what to do about it. That it was her birthday, that the caller might be Lily, or Viv, had been the only half-lucid thoughts to enter her head, even as she registered that it was in fact her ex-husband’s face on the screen. ‘Why would he be with me?’ she repeated stupidly, already swinging her legs out of bed, tugging her nightshirt down, rubbing the sleep from the corners of her eyes and righting the glass. The water was pooling round Viv’s birthday gift, a leather-bound journal emblazoned with the unnerving command, ‘Write Your Life!’, which had arrived the day before in an Amazon box Esther had opened without thinking. Inside, there had been a card, containing apologies for not being able to drop by, because of the kerfuffle of cramming in consultations and trying to get the family off on holiday to France that weekend.

‘Because there was a party,’ Lucas said levelly. ‘In London. An eighteenth. He’s got keys. It’s obvious he’ll have decided to stay at yours. You know what he’s like. Last-minute merchant.’

‘Yes, thank you, Lucas, I do know what my own son is like. And no, it is not remotely obvious Dylan is upstairs.’ Esther was trying to be cool, but could hear the catch of panic in her voice. Anger, too, was stirring. The arrogance of Lucas, the insult of always being told things rather than listened to – two years apart and a decree absolute had changed nothing. ‘I would have heard him.’ She snatched the journal from the flood as she talked, throwing it onto the bed, aware of a fleeting, guilty certainty that she would never meet the book’s challenge anyway. Viv always meant well and was big on the therapeutic importance of writing things down. In the early days after the split, when Esther had been stuck in the miserable, unnerving time-warp of camping with Dylan at her parents’, her old friend had got her scrawling her darkest invectives on pieces of paper, stamping them underfoot and then ripping the whole lot to shreds. ‘How could it help?’ Esther had wailed, only to find a surprising release in the sheer expenditure of energy, not to mention the faint notion of stamping on Lucas himself, and his catalogue of marital crimes.