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“Says the man who is currently a house husband in a mansion in LA.”

“Someone has to.” He laughed. “And anyway, I am working. I’m learning all about the coastal climate in the UK and how it differs from the coastal climate here. Jay’s homework is brutal. I can’t remember learning all that at school, but it was probably part of the curriculum, and I completely missed it.”

“Yes, making trouble no doubt.”

“Absolutely,” he agreed. “And now I wish I’d paid attention. It’s actually quite interesting…”

He rambled on about cloud formations and weather patterns while I absentmindedly watched the neighbour. He hadn’t moved from that chair and now had his head in his hands, those broad shoulders of his shaking violently.

“Go talk to him,” Reuben said, smirking again.

Busted. “What? I’m talking to you.”

“You’re not even listening. I can see your eyes moving. You’re more interested in the neighbour than your own son.”

He was messing with me; I knew that. But still.

“I’ll talk to you later,” I decided and hung up. The curtain twitching had to stop. The rain out there, I had nocontrol over, but the man sitting in it, sobbing his heart out? I could do something about that.

2. Dylan

Icouldn’t control it anymore, and that in itself was problematic. I hadn’t managed to get up this morning, my body once again paralysed and unable to function. Perhaps it was sheer exhaustion from my pulse racing again and the constant panic attacks and the way these goddamn antidepressants worked.

Or didn’t. I’d upped my dose two weeks ago, under the guidance of my doctor like the responsible human being I was. Not for the first time, I might add, and it took acouple of weeks for things to stabilise. I just wasn’t in the right frame of mind to see that. Accept things would get better, because right now, everything was dark and hopeless and muddled, and I couldn’t seem to make my body function. My brain was running too slowly, having to deal with the darkness in my head, the constant reminders of my complete and utter failure to keep myself sane.

It wasn’t easy in a world where nothing was fair. Where money bought triumphs over honesty and where a mother was judged to be the fitter parent, irrespective of what came out of her mouth.

I was depressed; I knew that. I was also hard done by, consumed by grief and longing for my children to the point I was losing my mind.

My children were alive and well on the other side of the Atlantic, living in some apartment complex in Miami with their nanny and a team of staff while theirdotingmother was heading up a divorce trial in New Orleans.

Which was obviously why I, their father, who lived in a four-bedroom townhouse with communal gardens, had been deemed an unsuitable choice to care for my children’s needs, their well-being, future education and most of all, to provide them with a stable, nurturing upbringing.

The angerdeep in my stomach was a constant, all-consuming backdrop to my inability to get dressed in the mornings and feed my starving body. I’d once tried yoga. It wasn’t for me. So I’d signed up for mindfulness classes, then joined a self-help group where they’d convinced me that walking barefoot in grass would make me see the world differently. It hadn’t. It was just easier than putting on shoes.

I’d given up on working, eating, exercising, laundry… Most of all, I had given up on myself. Grief like this did that to you, and despite having heard of similar cases in the past, circus-like court cases where people’s lives were utterly razed to the ground, I’d never thought the clown in the middle would turn out to be me.

I needed to go to work. I had contracts and obligations to fulfil, and I was in so much bloody debt and trouble already. My PA, whom I had let go months ago, still rang me daily, sometimes threatening me, sometimes trying to get me to see the imaginary light she was shining at me from the end of the tunnel.

I had a future, she would say. My children would one day need me.

Lies, all lies, determined by a farcical family court, under the watchful eye of my ex-wife. The mother of my children.

I hadn’t seen them in over a year. I wondered if my now three-year-old even knew who I was, if he ever asked for his daddy. Or if he called that horrible man my ex-wife now called her husband…

I didn’t want to think about it. Didn’t want to remember. Too late. The violent shudders erupted again as I tried to take control over the goddamn crying.

I could hear my phone ringing somewhere inside. I had long given up on jumping up and hopefully tapping the screen whenever it made a noise. It had all been futile, that dream of contact. A simple phone call, just their voices on the other end of the line, would have been enough. The thought of it made my throat close up in grief.

I was surprised the damn thing still had battery—I rarely even charged it anymore. I wanted it to die, to just leave me alone.

I was alone, living in a house where I never went upstairs anymore. I’d dismissed the cleaning service months ago and just existed, drifting mindlessly between the patio and the one space I had left that didn’t include memoriesof a life I no longer had. A small kitchenette, the old worn-out guest bed, a chair, the TV showing a grey static screen from where I’d turned it on last night and failed to get the channels to show anything else.

Everything was too much of an effort. Nothing made sense. And I felt like I wasn’t even here anymore.

I was nothing. Just static in this weird rain.

Wet. Cold. I didn’t feel it anymore. I got up and once again circled the garden, my now muddy feet flattening the sodden grass. It was supposed to focus me, make me one with Earth. What a load of crap.