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Hope was already in strict mode, already getting herself riled up for a fight with her daughter, but Alice’s words took the wind out of her sails. “What?”

“I’m not going,” Alice said, looking up now defiant and angry.

“Why on earth not?” was all Hope could think to ask. No mention of the fact that there was no choice, that they both had to go. No mention of the fact that actually, come to think of it, Hope would also quite like to curl back up in bed and not have to go, not have to face Ava.

Alice sniffed. “You could tell her to stay.”

“What?”

Alice took a deep breath and said louder: “You could ask her to stay. Tell her to stay.”

“Who?” asked Hope, knowing full well who Alice was talking about.

“Ms. Stanford. You could tell her to stay here.”

Hope let out a breath. “Love, I can’t do that.”

“But you like her,” said Alice. “I know you do. And she likes you too. I thought you were friends. Best friends. Even maybe special friends. You know, like daddy and ‘Melia.”

“Special friends?” Hope spluttered. “Why would you say that?”

Alice looked at her with shrewd brown eyes. “Because you smile at her the same as ‘Melia smiles at daddy and ‘Melia said to me that she loves daddy. She said she loves me too if I want. But if I don’t want then it’s okay.”

Hope took this in, sitting back in her kitchen chair like she’d been gut-punched. “Alice,” she said eventually. “Al. We can’t, I can’t… Things are complicated.”

“Grown ups always say that when they don’t want to explain.”

“Because some things are difficult to explain,” said Hope as patiently as she could. Time was ticking. They needed to leave.

Alice bent over her coloring again, tongue sticking out of the corner of her mouth in concentration.

“Al, we need to get ready to go.”

Alice sighed heavily and Hope dearly wished that she could give in. She wished they both could give in and go back to bed.

One of the advantages of having a child though was that there was no time to wallow, no time to be self-indulgent, no time to think of what could have been. Not that it didn’t hurt. It hurt so bad that Hope was still reeling from it. Reeling because she hadn’t expected it to hurt so badly, hadn’t planned on falling so far so fast.

“You could ask Ms. Stanford to stay if you wanted to,” Alice said stubbornly.

She couldn’t though, could she? How do you ask someone to give up everything for you?

More than that though, how do you recover from asking someone to give up everything for you only to have them refuse?

When Noah had walked out, Hope had been so numb that nothing had hurt for days. She’d assumed that because the love was gone, the pain was less. Then one morning, she’d dropped Alice off at her mother’s, gone home, sat at the kitchen table and started to cry.

Started to cry and hadn’t stopped until the sky was already dark.

Cried with the sheer weight of it, the crushing failure of it all, cried for the dreams that were ending and the ones that would never get a start. Cried because the pain caught up with her.

And if that happened after Noah, who she knew she had fallen out of love with, how much would it hurt after someone she was falling in love with?

She couldn’t take that chance. Couldn’t risk losing herself to that sadness. Couldn’t risk her daughter’s feelings as well as her own. No, she needed to take a page out of Ava’s book. She needed to build a wall, defend herself, protect herself and her daughter.

“If we don’t leave right now, we’re going to be late,” she said.

Alice bit her lip. She hated being late.

“And who knows what you might miss?” Hope said. “This is the last week of insects. You might miss a quiz or some painting. You might miss the next part of James and the Giant Peach.”