‘We’re having a movie night,’ Harry announced when they came in forty minutes later. ‘Your choice.’

Janie shook her head. ‘I don’t mind what we watch.’

‘In that case the girls want Aladdin again.’

‘Fine by me,’ she said, as Harry wavered in the doorway.

‘You are joining us?’ he asked.

‘Of course I am.’ She screwed her eyes up at him, matching the way he was looking at her. What else did he think she was going to do? She would never not sit with them, if they were watching a film together. ‘I’ll make some popcorn.’

Harry nodded. ‘Ella’s obviously feeling better.’

‘Good,’ she said as they heard Ella’s laughter ringing from the living room. ‘I’m glad.’

As Harry left the kitchen, she watched her husband and considered how he could be so present at times and so absent at others, and wondered which way she actually preferred it.

It was late by the time the girls eventually went to bed. Harry had retreated to the kitchen and set up his laptop. Janie picked up a bottle of Chablis and took it through to the living room, where she flicked on an episode of Luther.

Now there was a man who was never home either, also more dedicated to his job than to his family, yet watching him gave her some pleasure: pleasure she no longer felt when Harry appeared in the doorway five minutes later.

‘Sorry about that – I had something I needed to finish. What are we watching?’

‘Luther.’

‘Do you want to watch a film?’

No, she thought, I want to watch Luther. ‘Can do,’ she replied.

Harry sat beside her on the sofa and shuffled closer until she could feel his leg alongside her own. In the early days of their relationship her skin had tingled at his slightest touch in a way she’d never felt before. She was thirty when they met, already worried she might not meet someone to settle down with, which fifteen years later was a ridiculous notion. But all her friends were getting married, some of them starting to have kids, and Janie had felt as if she was being left behind.

Harry had walked into the bar where she was sitting with her girlfriends, celebrating her birthday. He looked nothing like the other men in there, making them look like boys in comparison, dressed in an open-necked, pale-pink shirt and black suit trousers. Janie had watched him from the table as he crossed to the bar and leaned across it, a twenty-pound note clutched in his hand. When he looked over his shoulder and caught her gaze, she felt as if time had stopped and everyone else in the bar had disappeared.