He did not manage it. That is not a triumph, it is just what happened. He rang me eight times on Monday and I answered the fourth, and he did not shout. He asked how his mother did the mornings.

We are twenty months into something now. He works the same job and leaves it at six. He does bedtime four nights. The golf clubs are in the garage and he plays about once a month and asks first, which he had never once done in eleven years. We did counselling for a year and there were two months in there I genuinely thought we were finished.

I go out on Thursdays. Choir, of all things. I am not good and I do not care.

Rosalind takes the little ones on Sundays and she and I speak more than she and her son do.

He told me I was no fun anymore, and he was right, and what he never worked out was that the fun had not gone anywhere. It had simply been spent, every single day, on him and on the six people we made together. I stopped waiting for somebody to notice what I was carrying and set it down instead, and the moment I did, everyone in that house finally saw the weight of it.