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home, I always try to play the part of loving husband. But it seems more like a role I play than what I actually am. It makes no sense because I love her and Ayden dearly. But I can’t seem to shake the burden that rests heavily on my shoulders. So my smile is fake, even though my love is real.
     
    ***
     
    2 Months Later…
     
    It’s been sixty days since my Dad passed away. Sixty days since my world stopped. I need to pull myself together and take over as the strong one of the family again. Anna has been amazing. She cooks and cleans, she does the school runs with Ayden. Where my mom and dad used to host Sunday dinners at their house, Anna has also taken over. She cooks at Mom’s house and cleans up after us all. Family dinners aren’t the same without my dad, but Anna tries her hardest to make it all okay. Mom seems okay. She’s not her normal exuberant self, but that’s to be expected. She sits around the table with us and goes through the motions, but you can see that the light in her eyes is dim now. She’s missing the other half of herself. That’s what my dad was. They were two halves of one whole and now Mom must cope on her own. The family all rally around her. Meghan takes her shopping. Jack and Leanne take Taylor round every other weekend and stay over. Auntie Pamela, my mom’s sister, goes round to see her every few days and they talk on the phone a lot. Everyone is doing their bit to make her see that life must go on. Anna does the same for me. She makes me see that life can’t stop here. She tells me that my dad wouldn’t want me to feel like this and she’s right. My dad was the life and soul of the party, the lynchpin of this family. He would never want us to mope around and go through the motions just to get through each day.

 
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    Chapter Six
     
     
    Annalise
     
    I was tired. Bone tired. School runs, Sunday dinners, cooking, washing, cleaning, looking after Ayden and Drake as well as making sure the rest of the family had someone to talk to. I shouldn’t complain, and normally I wouldn’t, but it had gotten to a point where it was driving me mad that Drake was being secretive. He was always texting someone, though he had his phone on silent and thought I don’t notice when it went off. He’d been getting back from work later than normal. I was left to do everything, and whilst I understood his grief over Dennis, I didn’t understand why he wouldn’t open up to me. Okay, his family had never been very tactile, and they bottled things up rather than talking, but since Dennis’ death, they’d opened up more. Meghan was coming round to talk or phoned me for a chat frequently. Leanne said Jack wouldn’t open up to her and we shared our feelings about the fact we had husbands that were closing us out. We got together for Ayden and Taylor to play while we sat in the garden and drank coffee or opened a bottle of wine.
    Drake was due to take some holiday from work so we had booked a week away. I was hoping that with time alone, he might finally open up to me. So we packed our bags and went to our favourite spot in Devon, the place he had proposed.
     
    We arrived at Paignton Zoo, ready to take Ayden to see the animals. His favourite stuffed toy was a penguin, in fact, he had stuffed toy penguins overrunning his bedroom at home. Wherever we went, we bought another one to add to the collection.
    As we walked round the zoo, taking in all the animals and their habitats, Drake suddenly came to a stop in front of my favourite animal, the wolf. This one looked like a cross between a fox and a wolf, he was a maned wolf, yellowish-red in colour with a white tip on his tail. I was busy admiring the wolf as he stalked around the grassland, too busy to pay any attention to what Drake was doing.
    People seemed to crowd around the gorgeous maned wolf and I couldn’t blame them…he was a fascinating animal, so I stepped back to allow others to see him. I turned round to Ayden in