‘You’re losing precious time, Janie. They won’t be young for long. These years will fly, even if it doesn’t feel like it now.’ She could still hear her mother’s voice as if she were sitting in the passenger seat next to her.

The more her mum had protested, the more Janie dug her heels in, ignoring the guilt that crawled through her veins. She was doing it for her girls, she told herself. Showing them that women don’t need to give up their careers.

Though, quite frankly, Janie had already realised that no one should ever have promised women they could have it all, because they couldn’t, and the realisation of that only made them feel like they were failing. The idea was laughable really, especially when she considered that some weeks her working hours, combined with Harry’s, topped one hundred and fifty. Of course she wasn’t having it all; she was losing out on being a mother, replaced by the twenty-three-year-old nanny who was living in her house and bringing up her toddlers.

‘It’s your choice,’ her mum had muttered once. ‘That’s all it boils down to. Choices.’ She had stayed at home to look after Janie until the day she went to university.

Janie later realised that her mum was right. It was all about making choices and accepting them. She had chosen a full-on career, which meant she was supposed to accept that she needed to outsource her childcare. Only she never could.

She glanced at the empty passenger seat beside her and inhaled a breath that seemed to swell in her throat. ‘I wish you could see me now, Mum,’ she said. ‘I finally did what you said I should.’ Unfortunately her mother had died six months after Janie moved south and never got to see the so-called choice that Janie had made, to give up her career and be a stay-at-home mum. So-called, because Janie never could reconcile that it was a choice. In the end, by the time they left London and she had given up her role as a defence barrister, Janie didn’t believe she’d had a choice at all.

But by then she had been thankful when Harry told her about the site he had found across the water from Lymington Quay. When he was excited about the possibility of branching out his already successful ad agency to the south coast, Janie considered that maybe it was exactly what they needed. And so she listened as Harry told her that he’d been playing with the idea for a while. He already had some big clients based along the M3 corridor, and there were a number of financial companies he’d been speaking to in Southampton and Bournemouth. He could share his time between London and the south. And how about, he suggested, she and the girls move down full-time?