Janie placed a cup of tea on the dining table in front of her husband and pulled out a chair to join him. She curled her fingers around her own cup as her gaze wandered out to the garden to some far-distant spot, beyond where the girls were playing on the trampoline. She had promised them both they would go out for the day, and although the August rain had subsided, as yet they hadn’t made it out of the house. There were still another three weeks of the summer holidays, yet somehow the days had passed them by. She regretted that they hadn’t made enough of them.

Of course it couldn’t be helped, when Harry was still recuperating, but she couldn’t stop herself thinking selfishly that it would be nice to get a week away, as they had planned, before Ella started secondary school.

She turned towards her daughter, whose long limbs flew into the air as she landed on her back and bounced straight back up onto her feet.

‘What are you reading?’ she murmured to Harry, lips pressed against her cup as she took a small sip of the too-hot tea.

‘Just an email. From Patrick.’ He closed his phone, snapping the case shut and pushing it across the table.

‘Everything all right?’

Harry nodded. ‘They seem to be doing a good job.’

‘Which is what you want,’ she prompted.

‘Yeah. Yeah, it is.’

She knew Harry struggled with what was happening to his business. They’d needed to discuss it often enough over the last couple of months. Harry’s lawyers were all over it, but there was a mountain of paperwork, decisions and conversations that sometimes got too much for him to handle on his own, when he was only two months out of hospital.

On top of that, Janie had listened patiently as Harry dissected his feelings about working, oscillating between one extreme and the other. On the one hand, he would tell her, he had no desire to go back – not when the place had nearly killed him. ‘Maybe this is a chance for me to do something completely different,’ he would say. ‘We can use the money to do whatever we want. We could go travelling.’ In these moments Harry would be in a brighter mood as he focused on the positives of the situation that had befallen them.

‘We can’t go travelling,’ she had told him more than once. ‘Ella’s at senior school now.’

‘Yeah, we can – of course we can,’ Harry would insist. ‘We’ve got nothing stopping us. Nothing keeping us in Lymington, if I sell the business.’

They last had this conversation a week ago. Harry didn’t want to go back to work at this point, although Janie knew his opinion would change again soon, and they would start the circle again. And when they did, Harry would be unsettled, feeling worthless, as if there was no point to his life.