Esther obeyed, slumping her head into her hands and letting the three-way FaceTime call with Lucas and Lily come back to her: Lucas, disconcertingly robbed of his usual maddening unflappability, his face a death mask, his voice high with emotion, as if it were about to splinter, as he veered between worry and curses at their son’s idiocy and selfishness. Lily too, pallid with shock, had been graver than Esther had ever seen her, allowing anger to burst through her expressions of concern. Dylan excelled at making everything about him, she hissed, close to tears. He didn’t care enough about the effect he had on others.

‘But just to leave… he must have been so desperate,’ Esther had cried.

‘Calm down, Esther…’

‘No, Lucas, I will not calm down. And you should have told me at once.’

‘I thought he might… I only waited a bit… and then you didn’t pick up anyway,’ he had countered miserably, waving the crumpled, paltry note that had been left on his dining room table:

Need time-out. Gone travelling. Sorry.

‘His head is so in the clouds,’ Lucas went on, making a visible effort to collect himself. ‘He’ll soon run out of steam and money and come home…’

‘Will he, though? I mean, how do we know that?’ Esther shouted. Lily flinched, tears now streaming down her face. ‘Lily, sweetheart…’ Esther took a deep breath, digging for sobriety and calm, ‘do you have any idea where he might have gone first?’

Lily swallowed and gave a pitiful shake of her head. ‘But he has messaged you, right, Mum?’ she said, in a tiny voice. ‘So, my hunch is that he is sort of okay, and, like Dad says, will come home soon enough.’

Esther returned her focus to Lucas, her head spinning again. ‘You told me you had it all in hand. You said he was okay. You said that the two of you had had a good talk, that everything was all right. That he – Dylan, our darling child – was all right. You, Lucas, said that. You.’

‘I thought he was,’ he whispered.

A silence followed. A silence in which Esther had a dizzying sense of the widening distance between the four of them. When she and Lucas had been together, there had at least been cohesion of sorts. Something for Lily and Dylan to believe in and hang onto.

‘I am going to see about flights,’ she had said hoarsely. ‘Try to get some sleep, Lily, darling. We’ll talk tomorrow.’ She hadn’t even been able to look at Lucas as they all signed off.