I sit by the window, coat still on, hands wrapped around my mug, and let myself breathe without anyone asking me forsnacks or phonics support. It feels rebellious, sitting still. Like I’m getting away with something.
Outside, the high street is doing its normal weekday thing, people walking too quickly with their collars up, someone with a pram negotiating the pavement like it’s a battlefield, a man carrying a dead Christmas tree like he’s been punished for not taking it down sooner. Life carries on. It always does, even when you don’t.
Clara arrives full of commentary and warmth and slightly too much lip gloss for ten in the morning, cheeks pink from the cold, scarf half unravelled, eyes bright even before she’s seen me properly. She spots me and does that little wave.
“You look tired,” she says when she reaches the table, but softly. Not like a judgement. Like a fact she’s holding gently.
“I am tired,” I admit. I don’t even try to pretend. I don’t have the energy. “I feel like I’ve been holding my breath for weeks.”
Clara sets her bag down and shrugs her coat off, then sits opposite me and leans in. “You don’t have to hold it here,” she says.
Something in me relaxes in the way it does when someone gives you permission you didn’t realise you were begging for. I swallow, stare down at my coffee, and then I tell her about Christmas Day properly this time. About not opening the curtains. About how strange it felt to wake up without Theo launching himself onto the bed and demanding a snack within thirty seconds. About hearing laughter from somewhere outside and realising it was Isla and Rory in the garden across the road and hating myself for looking.
“It didn’t even feel like Christmas,” I say, staring into the dark swirl of coffee like it might offer an explanation. “It just felt like… a Tuesday with fairy lights.”
Clara reaches across the table and squeezes my hand, her thumb rubbing once over my knuckles. “That sounds really lonely,” she says.
“It was fine,” I say immediately, because it’s easier to pretend it was. It’s an instinct, like blinking. “It was okay. It was… quiet. Which I needed.”
Clara doesn’t argue. She just gives me a look. The sort of look that says, I heard what you said, and I also heard everything you didn’t.
“You didn’t open the curtains, Freya.”
I roll my eyes like that’s the most normal thing in the world. “It was gloomy outside anyway. No point ruining the ambience.”
Clara’s mouth twitches. “Ambience. Right.” She rolls her eyes.
I shift in my seat, suddenly too aware of my own body, my own voice, the way I’m sitting like I’m still bracing for someone to walk in and catch me being sad. “Also,” I add quickly, because silence is dangerous, “Theo had a lovely day. He was happy. That’s what matters.”
Clara lifts her eyebrows. “And you?”
I exhale through my nose. “And I survived, which is basically the mum equivalent of thriving, isn’t it?”
Her look sharpens, and there it is again, that quiet insistence. Clara doesn’t let me turn everything into a joke and call it healing.
“Freya,” she says, not harsh, but firm. “Talk to me.”
So I do. Sort of. Half-truths and vague answers. That’s my speciality. “I just… I didn’t want to make it a thing,” I say. “Everyone had their own stuff going on. Hannah was ill, you had the in-laws, and I didn’t exactly want to be the friend who ruins Christmas because she’s feeling sorry for herself.”
“You weren’t feeling sorry for yourself,” Clara says. “You were alone. Those are different things.”
I stare out of the window because if I look directly at her I might cry, and I cannot cry in Rose’s because I will then have to pretend I’ve got something in my eye and that will be humiliating.
Clara’s voice softens. “Was he there? Rory, I mean.”
My stomach does that little, irritating dip at his name. Like my body hears it before my brain has time to put up a wall.
“He was across the road,” I say too casually. “In the garden. Playing. Laughing. Being… Rory.”
Clara’s eyes narrow just slightly. “And you watched.”
“It was accidental,” I say immediately. “I just… heard it. And then I looked. Obviously I looked. I’m not a saint.”
“Did he see you?”
I shake my head. “No. He didn’t.”
Clara hums like she doesn’t quite believe me. “And how did that make you feel?”
