Mum studies me. “You two okay?”
“We’re friends,” I say, perhaps a touch too quickly.
Dad lets out a low hum. “That so?”
“We agreed,” I add, as if that makes it legally binding. “It’s better that way.”
“For who?” Mum asks gently.
“For everyone,” I say, because that’s the answer that sounds responsible. The truth is messier. The truth is that when she looked at me like that in the pub, hurt and furious and still somehow wanting me, I realised that if I push this the wrong way, I don’t just lose a shot at something bigger. I lose her completely.
Isla clambers into my lap again, pressing another new book under my chin. “You love Theo’s mum,” she announces with the blunt cruelty of a seven-year-old who thinks she’s made a ground-breaking discovery.
“Traitor,” I mutter.
She grins. “Theo told me you look at her funny.”
Mum coughs suspiciously.
I stare at the tree for a long moment, then sigh. “Yeah,” I say eventually, because there’s no point pretending in this room. “I love her.”
The words feel both obvious and reckless.
Dad nods once like he’s been waiting years for me to stop pretending otherwise. Mum squeezes my arm but doesn’t say anything triumphant.
“And?” she prompts softly.
“And we’re friends,” I repeat, forcing it to sound sensible instead of tragic. “She deserves stability. She deserves someone who didn’t disappear for years and expect her to be waiting when he came back.”
“You think that’s what this is?” Dad asks mildly.
I shrug. “I think I’ve caused enough damage.”
Mum’s expression softens. “Pulling away won’t protect her.”
“It might protect her from me,” I reply.
And there it is. The ugly, unpolished truth of it. I don’t trust myself not to want more. I don’t trust myself not to reach for her again. And if I do that and she decides I’m not worth the risk, I won’t just lose a kiss. I’ll lose her entirely.
The rest of the day unfolds in warmth and noise and too much food. Isla insists on showing me every toy twice. Dad falls asleep in the armchair. Mum overfeeds everyone. And through all of it, Freya hums at the back of my mind like a note I can’t quite tune out. I am here in this house with my amazing family and I am so grateful. I am happy watching my daughter glow under fairy lights that don’t match and tinsel that hangs crooked. And I am still thinking about the woman across the road who almost kissed me.
Being friends is the safest option. Even if it feels like the worst one.
Chapter twenty-eight
freya
Christmas morning does not feel like Christmas when you wake up and there is no small person launching themselves at your face. It feels like a Sunday. A quiet, slightly grey, slightly pointless Sunday.
I wake up because my body is used to waking up early on Christmas Day, because for the past seven years there has been a boy practically vibrating at the end of my bed whisper-shouting, “Mum, can I go downstairs yet?” as if Father Christmas might revoke his gifts if he makes too much noise. This morning there is nothing. No whispering. No rustling wrapping paper. No tiny feet padding across the landing. Just silence.
I lie there for a long time, staring at the ceiling, listening to the hum of the boiler and the faint sound of a car door closing somewhere outside. The house feels bigger without Theo in it. Not physically bigger, but emotionally. Like the walls have stretched and the air has thinned.
I reach for my phone, check the time, and then deliberately put it face down because I do not want to see whatever filtered, matching-pyjama, happy-family photo James inevitably posts later. I do not want to see Theo in a jumper chosen by someone else, sat between people who get to wake up with him thismorning. I do not want to see a photo of my son with a baby that is his half-sibling. A baby that got to feel the love of two parents from the day it was born.
This might be the hardest part of co-parenting. Not the logistics. Not the handovers. Not the polite exchanges in driveways. It is this. The quiet, the absence, the knowledge that your child is experiencing Christmas somewhere else and you are not part of the picture.
I eventually drag myself downstairs in yesterday’s jumper, hair unbrushed, and don’t even bother switching the lights on or opening the curtains. The tree glows softly in the corner, twinkling to itself like it hasn’t noticed the room is half empty. I scoop a tub of ice cream out of the freezer before nine a.m. and carry it to the sofa like it is a completely reasonable breakfast choice, then put on 50 First Dates because if I’m going to feel sorry for myself, I might as well lean into it. It doesn’t even feel festive. It just feels quiet.
