He laughed, standing up. "Okay, but just to be clear, no sex rewards for dishwashing?"
I threw a pillow at him.
And so, we made a deal: no more transactional sex, no more obligation. If we were going to get back to how we were after the boardroom chat, we had to want each other again. No shortcuts. No deals. Just genuine, messy, awkward, real reconnection.
Whether or not Dan would actually succeed in "wooing" me again remained to be seen. But I had to admit, watching him walk away, a new determination in his step, I felt something I hadn’t in a good few weeks.
Hope.
Such a small, stupid word, really. Four letters, barely enough to fill a Post-it note. And yet, there it is, clinging to me likeglitter. You can try to brush it off, but it just keeps showing up in new places.
Dan, true to his word, started his “Operation Woo Emma” the very next day. Unfortunately, he seemed to have taken his cues from a 1990s romantic comedy written by someone who’s never met an actual woman.
It began with coffee. He brought me a cup in bed, which would’ve been lovely if it weren’t lukewarm and served in a mug that said World’s Okayest Mum.
“Thought I’d give you a lie-in,” he said, clearly proud of himself.
It was 6:17 a.m. Sophie was already singing in her room. Loudly, about her missing hair bobble, Ruby was crying because her unicorn sock “looked sad,” and Oscar was downstairs raiding the cereal cupboard like a raccoon.
I blinked at him. “Dan, this isn’t a lie-in. This is just… delayed suffering.”
He grinned. “It’s the thought that counts?”
“Then next time, think quieter.”
He laughed and kissed the top of my head before disappearing downstairs to “handle breakfast,” which, in our house, is code for “create chaos and leave the kitchen looking like a Weetabix massacre.”
Sure enough, when I finally made it down, the scene looked like something from a low-budget apocalypse movie. Milk puddles. Cereal glued to the floor. Ruby with a cornflake stuck to her forehead. Sophie in tears because her toast had “a face.” And Dan? Sitting at the table, scrolling on his phone like a man who had survived battle.
“Everything is under control,” he said.
I gestured around the kitchen. “Define ‘control.’”
He pointed to the toaster. “I made toast!”
I sighed and grabbed the cloth. “And yet, somehow, I’ll be the one cleaning the aftermath.”
As I wiped the counter, I caught my reflection in the shiny kettle, messy bun collapsing, mascara from yesterday faintly smudged under my eyes, a bit of toothpaste on my top. This was me. The woman who once spent twenty minutes perfecting her eyeliner now celebrated if she remembered deodorant.
And every morning, without fail, I’d open Instagram while sipping my reheated coffee and torture myself with those immaculate mums who somehow manage to look like walking Pinterest boards. Their houses are spotless, their kids wear matching linen outfits, and their captions say things like “Just embracing the chaos of motherhood” while standing in front of a kitchen that looks like it’s never met a Cheerio.
Meanwhile, I’m scraping dried porridge off the wall.
I scrolled past one of those perfectly curated posts, a mum named Amelia whose bio read: “Boy mama, coffee lover, making memories every day” and muttered, “Making memories? I’m making packed lunches and losing my sanity.”
Dan overheard me and smirked. “You’re comparing yourself to Insta-Mums again, aren’t you?”
I threw him a look. “They have white sofas, Dan. White. Sofas. Do you know what would happen if we owned one?”
He nodded solemnly. “It would be a recipe for disaster.”
Exactly.
Later that week, “Operation Woo” escalated.
It started with flowers. Big, dramatic supermarket flowers that looked like they were trying too hard.
He walked in after work, bouquet in hand, face smug. “For my beautiful wife.”
