My throat tightens.
“Me too.”
And then it happens. His hand brushes mine. Accidental. Maybe. Then it comes back. Intentional.
His fingers curl around mine slowly, like he’s testing whether I’ll pull away.
I don’t. God, I don’t. It feels… familiar. Warm. Solid.
His thumb rubs gently across my knuckles like muscle memory.
And I realise something terrifying.
I’ve missed this more than I’ve allowed myself to admit. Not the grand gestures. Not the dramatic romance. Just this.
Being held.
Being chosen.
Being touched without being needed.
We walk like that the rest of the way to the supermarket.
Side by side.
Hands linked.
Talking about small things. Work. The kids. The way Oscar insists subterranean is a useless word. But underneath it all, there’s something else.
A current.
When we reach the automatic doors, he doesn’t let go straight away. Instead he squeezes once. Grounding.
“I’m glad we did this,” he says.
“It’s just milk,” I tease.
He looks at me properly then.
“No,” he says softly. “It isn’t.”
And suddenly the fluorescent lights don’t feel quite so unromantic. Because this doesn’t feel like an errand.
It feels like the first step back toward something that was always ours.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
EMMA
It's Monday again. How did that happen? One minute, it’s Friday night and I’m convincing myself I’ll have a nice, relaxing weekend, and the next, I’m knee-deep in another school run, wondering how time moves so fast and yet so painfully slow at the exact same time.
Like, the hours between dinner and bedtime? They drag on for eternity. I swear, I age a full decade every evening between the start of bath time and the moment the last child finally stops creeping downstairs “just to ask a quick question.” But the days themselves? Gone in a blink. I feel like I’m constantly playing catch-up in a game I never actually signed up for.
This morning, Ruby had me up at the crack of dawn, like some sort of tiny, unrelenting alarm clock that doesn’t have a snooze button. And, of course, with her wake-up came Sophie’s. Because heaven forbid one child be awake without immediately summoning another into consciousness. Sophie’s been pleading with me to play with her since approximately 5:43 a.m., and my soul is tired.
The thing is, I do play with them. I build the towers, I do the puzzles, I nod enthusiastically while they shove dolls in my face and demand I make them talk in very specific accents. But do Ienjoy it? No. Not even a little bit. And that makes me feel like a terrible mum. It’s not that I don’t love them, because obviously I do, more than anything.
It’s just that my idea of fun doesn’t involve pretending to be a talking unicorn named Sparkleberry who runs a bakery for woodland creatures. I try, I really do, but after five minutes, I’m mentally making a shopping list or wondering if I can fake a phone call to get out of it.
