She supposed he was right. The twins would wake in the night and getting up to prepare bottles for them after several wines would probably be a nightmare. Not that she’d have to do it alone. Pete always helped out . . . well, when he was jabbed awake he did, anyway. The man could sleep through a semi-trailer driving through the lounge room. But he didn’t do it on purpose. As soon as he was awake, he was out of bed and heating up bottles or rocking the girls while Mimi mixed up the formula.

That was the handy thing about having a husband who worked from home. It meant he was very hands-on with their kids. He’d turned one of the bedrooms at the back of the house into his study and it looked out over Lane Cove National Park. He said it was the perfect place to write because looking out at the bush gave him all the inspiration he needed to create his adventure stories.

When they met, he’d just finished writing his first book and was nervously preparing to submit it to a publisher. He let Mimi read his manuscript and for fun, she’d started doodling drawings of the main characters. When he saw the drawings, he said they’d given him the courage to send the book out, because she’d brought his characters to life for him. He’d included Mimi’s sketches with his submission and now, seventeen years later, he’d written and she’d illustrated twenty books in the Timid Tongue-Tied Timmy adventure series. She’d studied graphic design before they met and she continued to work at a small printing firm in the early days, but once the books took off, she left to work on the illustrations full time. Art had always been her passion above design.

People often asked them how they did it — lived and worked so closely together. I’d go insane if I didn’t get my eight hours at the office away from my husband, several of the school mums said. But the truth was, it was easy for Mimi to spend so much time with Pete because he was her best friend. And it helped that she was still bloody attracted to the guy. Even after spending almost two decades with him, even after he’d started to lose his hair and had to shave it all off, even with those few extra kilos around the middle, he could still stir something inside her when he looked at her in just the right way. Her favourite thing about him was his arms — they were muscular and strong and she liked nothing better than snuggling into his chest and having him wrap those arms around her.