‘I think Esther’s making a pitch for godmother, darling,’ Shona answered quickly, ‘but she’ll have to join the queue, won’t she?’

‘I’m just glad the pair of you hadn’t been kidnapped,’ Carole said dryly. ‘I’ve settled up. My treat, Esther.’ Her face flexed in and out of a smile. ‘All set, Shona?’

At home an hour later, Esther’s distraction was temporarily broken by a surge of guilt at the sight of her new pet, his stomach more of a barrel than usual thanks to the quantities of food she had left down to cover for her absence. He was probably ready to return to the freedoms of coming and going through a cat-flap, but the chance of losing something else now felt even more unconscionable.

‘Soon, puss, soon,’ she muttered, dumping the bag at the bottom of the stairs, before taking Dylan’s passport out of her handbag and placing it, photo page open, on the kitchen table.

She poured and drank a tumbler of water, and then a second. Her fatigue had entered a new phase; her head pulsed, hyper-alert, but empty. Dylan. She tried to find him with her mind, to think him into being, but all that arrived was more shame at her selfish blindness, for two years so ensnared by her own challenges that she hadn’t looked hard enough at her son’s. Her son. And Lucas’s. Esther studied the little photo seeing as never before that, for all the differences in eye and hair colour, the likeness between the two of them was uncanny; the shape and set of Dylan’s eyes, the broad forehead, the contours of the cheeks and jaw – he was the spit of Lucas. And both so handsome. Lucas. Longing flooded into the emptiness inside her head. A timeless longing, for the father of their beautiful offspring, for what they once had, all of it now shattered.

Carefully, Esther found herself crossing the kitchen and reaching up to the top shelf of the dresser for the mended pot. Such an early gift from Lucas, presented with all the early courtship worry as to whether she would like it or not. She ran her fingertips over the hardened baubles of glue now holding it together. Life, for precious objects, for people, was so fragile, so cobbled together. From mess-ups like Chris Mews, to marvels like Viv, no one had an easy ride. All that mattered in the end was kindness. To see this so clearly felt not just new to Esther, but vital; something to be shared. With Lucas most of all. She needed to speak to him anyway. He didn’t yet know about Mei Lin, let alone the passport.