It was a long time before she let her father meet Terry. She’d kept him out of sight at first, when her father turned up on a Friday – a routine that had begun after Noah’s death and developed more easily than she would have imagined possible after all that had happened. Sometimes her mother was with him, peering out from the car, but usually it was to her father that she spoke – he who for so many years had kept his thoughts private and hidden. She would always have Dominic ready. Wearing his best clothes, he’d have a rucksack with enough outfit changes for the weekend, his toothbrush, a hairbrush, and also a few coins in case he wanted to buy them all an ice cream. As a child herself, whenever Simone had been sent to people’s houses, it was always with a few coins in a small purse, and the instruction by her mother that if she was taken out, she must make sure to offer ice cream. Although Simone didn’t like to admit it, she hoped her mother would notice that she had remembered this nicety. In fact, she hoped that both of her parents would notice Dominic’s carefully packed bag, and his brushed hair, and induce from it that she’d done something right.

They never did notice that though. They noticed that Dominic was too thin, and that he ate as though he was never fed at home – was he fed at home, they asked her. They noticed that he had coughs constantly, and glue ear twice the same winter, and that he seemed smart enough, but not able to concentrate, not the way a child his age should. They noticed that he often seemed anxious when they first got him home. That he cried a lot in his sleep. That sometimes it seemed as though he couldn’t tell the difference between the bedtime stories they read to him, and the real world, and they weren’t sure if that was because of some blurred lines in his cognition, or simply because he was trying to escape reality. They asked her, weekly, if she’d thought again about letting Dominic live with them.

Simone always made sure to hurry Dominic away before they could trudge too deeply into this conversation. She despised the way that he looked forward to Fridays. She despised the way he talked about her parents with such awe, telling her about a game of chess with her father, or a rainy afternoon baking with her mother, or his latest acquisitions from the book-laden office she had never been allowed to enter. She despised the way he returned as if infused with new life. And she despised him, her son, for the opening he seemed to have so easily forged into hearts that had always been closed fast to her.

Even more than she despised Dominic, however, Simone hated her parents. Hated them, with a consuming, sucking, ravaging force. She hated them for noticing things about her child that she didn’t. For having failed, when she was young, to notice anything about Simone herself. For even now seeing only her flaws. Or worse, not seeing her at all. For never inviting her to spend the weekend with them. Never asking her what she did those days when she was alone. Never wondering why she was thin, why she couldn’t concentrate, why she needed to escape from reality too.