I need to show her, every day, that she is not invisible. That she is not alone. That she is not failing.
She is everything.
And if she can’t see it yet, then I’ll keep telling her until she does.
Because Emma deserves to feel beautiful.
Not someday.
Not when things are easier.
Not when the kids are older or the house is tidier or she’s had more sleep.
Now.
Exactly as she is.
And I won’t make the mistake of assuming she knows that ever again.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
EMMA
I stare at Dan next to me in bed, both of us hovering in that strange limbo between sleep and responsibility. We’ve officially decided to work on us, but now that we’re here, wrapped in the quiet of a morning before the kids wake up and chaos detonates, I have no idea what that actually looks like in real life.
We’ve laid our cards on the table. Everything is out there. It’s… weirdly liberating. Like a window has finally been cracked open in a room I didn’t realise was suffocating me.
But now what?
How do we bring back the spark without it feeling forced? How do we go from emotional honesty to actual romance without one of us cringing ourselves into another dimension?
“So,” I start, rolling over to face him properly. “How do we… do this?”
Dan blinks at me, still half asleep. His hair is sticking up at the back like he’s been electrocuted in the night. Even like this, he looks good, and the fact that my brain even registers that feels like progress.
“This?” he repeats. “As in…?”
“As in us,” I say, waving my hand vaguely as if our entire marriage is floating somewhere near the ceiling waiting to be retrieved. “The whole reconnecting, bringing back the spark thing.”
He exhales and rubs his face, the motion slow like he’s buffering. “I don’t know. Feels like we’ve forgotten how to ride a bike.”
“Exactly!” I point at him, delighted he gets it. “And not just any bike. A tandem bike. Where one wrong move sends us both crashing into a bush.”
He smirks. “And then we just lie there, pretending it doesn’t hurt.”
“Exactly,” I say again, because yes. That. That is us.
We share a brief moment of quiet, the kind that feels like it could become a deeper conversation.
And then it happens.
A scream erupts from the next room. Rapid stomping footsteps. More screaming.
“MUUUUM!”
Oscar barrels into our bedroom like he’s storming a beach. “Sophie threw my LEGO spaceship into the toilet!”
Sophie storms in right behind him, completely unbothered. “I was aiming for the sink.”
