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“Okay,” I whispered.

And it was. I could cope. For the first time today, I actually believed it. This was… I smiled. I just couldn’t stop myself.

“Dinner,” he said calmly. Then he kissed me.

“Stewart, we’re in the closet.”

He laughed. He always did at my stupid attempts at jokes.

“I’m not in the closet,” he said calmly. “I’m too old to care what people think. I’m with you, and if that is an issue with anyone? Well, as my son would say, they can fuck right off.”

“I think I did fancy my tennis coach,” I admitted. I had. Who was I kidding?

“Good for you.” He laughed. “No more tennis for you then. I think I may have a jealous streak. At least not with that guy. New coach, and—”

“Stewart, I was really bad at tennis. Trust me. Useless. Barely hit the ball, but I still did the lessons because it made me feel…I don’t know. Alive? It made me feel something. I understand that now.”

“See? We’re both figuring this out.”

“Perhaps we are.”

“And in the end, does it matter?”

“Not really,” I admitted. Then I kissed him back.

Two hours later, I had both boys asleep, Constance in her room, and had stumbled into the upstairs bathroom, not knowing what I was doing.

I had no clothes left up here, everything having migrated to the flat downstairs, and there was not even a towel on the rack.

Bare. Empty.

Fresh start. It weirdly felt like it, the familiar tiles around me, the way the jets spurted out of the showerhead, hitting the wall in heavy waves.

Clean. Getting all the day’s anxieties washed off me so I could sleep. Stupid words rumbled through my head, mantras that were supposed to calm me. It had never worked in the past, but now, strangely, it did.

Day one. And it had been…okay. We’d all made it. I hadn’t lied about that, despite the still-heavy lump sat in my stomach.

Three weeks. There was no way I was giving my children back. And I had no solutions. No answers. No control here, despite the lock on my front door.

I didn’t have sheets on the bed either, but that was the least of my troubles, I discovered when I found Stewart placing a pile of sheets on the mattress, still with an apron around his waist.

“You look like you’re my butler.” I smiled, speaking quietly so as not to wake up my youngest son, who was flat on his back in the cot, one leg sticking out through the bars. He definitely needed a bigger bed.

Stewart shook out the sheet. “And you’re naked and wet.”

“No towels.”

He motioned to the hallway, where the light was still on in the walk-in closet.

“These looked bigger, so I assumed they were for this bed,” he said, tugging at the corner of the fitted sheet.

“Yes,” I said. “Wrong ones. These are too small. This bed is a super king.”

“Fancy.” He smiled as I went back in the closet, found something that looked vaguely familiar, and passed it to him like he really was my butler.

Stupid. But he smiled, and I disappeared downstairs to find…

Pants.