CHAPTER ONE
EMMA
I stare at the sink, daring the dishes to wash themselves.
They don’t.
A sippy cup. Three plastic plates crusted with something once edible. A baby bottle. A frying pan with what might be a fossilised fragment of scrambled egg welded to its surface. I should wash them. I need to wash them. But my arms feel like they’re made of wet sand and my brain is wrapped in fog.
Behind me, the TV shrieks with some aggressively cheerful cartoon the kids have already seen a hundred times.
“Get off! That’s my seat!” Oscar shouts.
“It’s not yours! You don’t own the sofa!” Sophie fires back.
Ah yes. The sacred middle cushion. No one knows how it achieved VIP status, but here we are, witnessing another territorial dispute. Oscar, eight, self-appointed ruler of all things. Sophie, six, feral with determination. Honestly, I respect her commitment to chaos.
Upstairs, Ruby starts crying.
I close my eyes. Count to three.
“Emma!” Dan calls.
There it is.
I don’t answer. Maybe if I pretend I didn’t hear him.
“Emma!”
I grip the counter. “What, Dan?”
“She won’t go down.”
Of course she won’t. She’s two. She survives entirely on spite and the residual drips of breastmilk.
“She wants you,” he adds, like that’s the solution.
I turn. He’s in the doorway, rubbing his forehead. His T-shirt is inside out. His hair looks like he’s been attacked by his own hands. He looks exhausted.
Good. So am I.
“She always does,” I mutter, brushing past him.
“Well,” he calls after me, “I’ll just stand here and be completely useless then.”
I don’t rise to it. If I do, this turns into a fight, and I don’t have the energy for another one tonight.
Ruby is standing in her cot, red-faced, dummy flung dramatically to the floor. The second she sees me, her arms shoot up. I scoop her up and she collapses against me instantly, like the last two minutes never happened.
“You just wanted Mummy,” I whisper, bouncing her gently. “You’re turning me into an arsehole, you know that?”
She sighs, content.
Traitor.
Ruby is chaos in human form; a cherub with a side hustle in destruction. Not part of the original plan. A ‘whoops’ that detonated our already-fragile balance. I love her more than oxygen, but some days I fantasise about hiding in the loo with a family-sized chocolate bar and a lock.
Downstairs, the shouting resumes.
