‘Whose party anyway? Do you even know?’ It was satisfying to see him flinch. He never owned up to his feelings. He never owned up to anything. Esther yanked open her bedroom door as she talked, straining her ears for sounds upstairs. Motherly anxiety was jetting through her bloodstream now and she wanted Lucas to share it, to admit to it. ‘But hey, let’s look on the bright side and hope it doesn’t involve ambulances this time, shall we?’

‘Don’t be dramatic, Esther, that was years ago.’

‘Three years, Lucas. Three measly years.’ Esther strode out onto the landing as she talked, managing in the process to catch her little toe on the door frame, which caused a stab of pain so blinding that she half collapsed onto the floor, clasping her foot and dropping the phone.

‘What on earth are you doing?’

‘I am going up to Dylan’s room, Lucas,’ she hissed, picking up the mobile, teeth clenched against the after-waves of pain. ‘What else would I be doing?’ She gave the screen a glare as she hobbled on towards the steep little staircase leading up to her tiny top floor. Behind Lucas’s head she could see the geometrically neat bookshelves of his treasured medieval texts, bright in the shafts of light falling through the tall windows of his Cambridge rooms. He looked spruce from his shower and morning stroll to college. Before that, Esther had no doubt, he would have done his usual dawn jog along the Cam, as yet oblivious to the emptiness of the smaller of his airy flat’s two spare bedrooms, the larger allocated for Lily who, living now with Matteo, barely used it. Lucas liked to lay it on thick about having their twenty-two-year old daughter, still studying at a college across town, under his care, just as Dylan for two years now had been primarily under Esther’s; but as they both knew, Lily was a breeze compared to her younger brother, always more independent, and so brimming with drive and self-sufficiency that it could hurt.

‘Panic over,’ Esther gasped, as much from relief as from the discomfort of managing the stairs with her injury. ‘Look.’ She held the phone up so Lucas could share her view of the roughly torn piece of paper fixed to Dylan’s bedroom door with a blob of chewed gum.

HEY MUM, SURPRISE!

PHONE DEAD, DIDNT WANT TO WAKE YA

HAPPY BIRTHDAY !!!!!

D XX

‘I knew it…’ Lucas crowed.