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means having carers coming in every day for the rest of her life, and us spending more time visiting her. Me and Gwenan and Nia, I mean,’ she added, as he looked up, his dark eyes wide with alarm.
    ‘Well, I still don’t see why you’ve ended up with it all.’ He straightened, pushing the dishwasher door shut and setting the cycle churning. ‘I don’t see why you let Gwenan and Nia get away with things like that. You really ought to stand up to them more.’
    ‘That’s all very well in theory. But the reality is that they both live miles away and they have children settled with school and friends, and exams coming up. So what am I supposed to do? Punish Mam?’
    ‘Surely there has to be somebody else. Some aunt, or something.’
    Carys finished sorting the baskets of laundry and began feeding the washing machine with last week’s whites. ‘It’s not like that anymore,’ she replied, doing her best to keep the irritation out of her voice. ‘There aren’t just loads of old aunts stashed away looking for something to do. Not even in Pont-ar- Eden. Everybody works. Even pensioners, nowadays. Haven’t you been into B&Q lately?’
    ‘Then maybe she would be better off in a Home.’
    She was tired. Her shoulders ached from days of tension and the strange bed of the B&B, followed by the drive back to Chester. She had a hundred and one things to do before work tomorrow morning, and her emotions were a rollercoaster, rendering her patience more than usually thin.
    ‘Is that what you’d do, if it was your mother?’ she snapped. He frowned at her, as if affronted by the suggestion. ‘Elaine isn’t that much younger than Mam,’ she added for good measure, feeling her temper dangerously close to getting out of hand. ‘And it could well be, one day.’
    Except, of course, it wouldn’t. She saw his eyes slide from hers, as he turned to fill the kettle. Joe was a man. The one with the career. The one rising rapidly through the ranks of Morley and Westcott, on track to be partner before he was forty. Morley, Westcott and Young, Chartered Accountants. That was the future, written in stone.
    It would be Joe’s sisters, Anna and Phyllis, mothers and career women both, who would step in, should anything happen to his parents. The assumption was there, unspoken.
    So much for equality. She wasn’t sure whether to laugh, cry, stamp her feet, or burn any bra she could lay her hands on. You go through life thinking it’s all sorted. Equal opportunities. Equal status. Nothing to stand in your way. And, okay, you hear about the pay gap and the twenty hours or so the average full-time working woman spends on domestic chores, but that isn’t you. That’s not the way you live your life.
    ‘I thought we agreed…’ she began. His back was rigid as he turned the tap, shutting her out. Carys bit her lip. She could hear herself turning into some old nag going on endlessly about compromise and commitment. As if they hadn’t been through this before. As if they hadn’t worked this all out, once and for all, two years ago. Or so she’d believed.
    Compromise and commitment. She would never have stayed with Joe if she hadn’t believed he’d seen her point of view. Joe always did what Joe wanted to do. She’d only understood this during the last few years, when – for her at least – spending every holiday rushing off to some activity-packed tour of India or Greece had finally began to pall. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to travel, just not all the time. She’d seen too many lost souls wandering from one exotic beach location to the next, in a rootless searching for some magical Nirvana that might be out there, somewhere.
    She no longer wanted to work in a job that bored her senseless, desperately making up for the time lost inside the office with expensive meals and holidays. She needed a centre to her life. Something to build on for the future. She’d thought Joe had understood. A cold shiver snuck in through her