My sister kissed my husband in front of thirty people at her own anniversary party and called it a joke. Her husband had a wrapped present in his hands and an envelope she had never opened.

Ellis moved out on the fourteenth of June, 2025, and moved back in on the ninth of March, 2026, which is nine months of me doing school runs alone and telling a six-year-old her dad was working away.

We had eleven sessions with a woman called Farrah and then he had a long stretch on his own, which was the bit that mattered.

We are all right. Not what we were, and I have stopped wanting what we were, because what we were included two years of my sister at his elbow and both of us calling it nothing.

And my daughter, who was six and who asked me a question in the car in the July that I have not been able to put down.

She had been told nothing. Neither of them had. What they knew was that Auntie Romy and Uncle Tobin were not married any more and that Dad was staying at a flat for a bit while he and Mummy sorted something out.