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She grew flowers in the garden and collected vintage perfume bottles and could still outdo anyone on the most bad-ass curry
without breaking a single bead of sweat.
    Oh yes. Harriet was awesome. But right now, he wasn’t sure he deserved such a woman. Right now, it was hard to look her in the eye and tell her yet another lie.
    He just had to have a bit of faith, he reminded himself bracingly, posting another chip in his mouth. He had to hang in there and wait for his luck to change. And it would, any day soon. It had
to.

Chapter Five
    ‘Freya? Have you got a minute? I need to speak to you.’
    It was eight thirty on Monday morning, but Freya already felt as if she’d lived through an entire week of stress. Dexter had woken up remembering too late that he had a geography test that
day and had glowered and thundered like one of the volcanoes in his text book. Teddy had turned the clean laundry pile into a crumpled mess looking for his Spider-Man socks, even though there were
at least five other pairs of perfectly wearable socks neatly balled together in his drawer. And Libby had casually announced at breakfast that her class was having a tea party that afternoon, and
she needed to bring in some party food. With their kitchen cupboards currently home to an assortment of ageing tins – kidney beans, peach slices in syrup, the wrong kind of mushy peas –
all old enough to start claiming a pension (she really must get to the supermarket, preferably sometime this century), the only thing remotely party-ish in there was a packet of chocolate
digestives. Unfortunately, when presented with this option, Libby got very cross, moaning that digestive biscuits weren’t at
all
party-ish, and that everyone else’s mums would
have baked cupcakes with swirly icing. ‘Well, if you’d just told me a bit
earlier
,’ Freya said through gritted teeth, feeling her patience stretching bubblegum-thin.
    ‘Yeah, if you’d told her earlier, Mum could have bought a packet of Hula Hoops as well. Big woo,’ muttered Dexter sarcastically from where he was simultaneously woofing down
most of a large box of cornflakes and memorizing a map of Central America.
    Freya counted to twenty under her breath in an attempt to stop herself screaming, wondered for a few deluded moments whether she should attempt to make some icing and decorate the chocolate
biscuits to look more festive – no, crazy idea, was she
insane
? – then resorted to making their packed lunches instead. Their packed lunches which – because she was in
dire need of a supermarket trip – were woefully boring (leftover-roast-chicken sandwich, apple, some bits of cheese and crackers) and would no doubt show up her poor neglected children yet
again compared to the packed lunches of their friends (mini salads and freshly baked sausage rolls and fairy cakes with sodding swirly icing). Aaargh. She thought viciously of her husband Victor,
almost certainly still fast asleep at the residential police-training centre, and deaf to all of this, and felt very much like driving down there and setting off an air horn outside his window. Just to be spiteful. Just so that he could share the suffering.
    On the way to school, she was cut up at two different traffic lights by impatient drivers, one of whom gave her the finger. Then she had to tell off Dexter, who had taken to using his own
invented rhyming slang wherever possible, in this case calling the second driver a ‘total Talamanca’.
    ‘Dexter, that’s enough,’ Freya snapped.
    ‘What? I only called him a Talamanca. It’s an area in Costa Rica. I thought you’d be pleased I had learned something for my geography test.’
    ‘Tala
manca,
’ Teddy echoed gleefully, and Freya groaned deep in her throat. Great. And of course that would be all round the infant classes within five minutes of the day
starting, you wait. Knowing her luck, there would be a polite phone call from the deputy head later that day:
Dr Castledine,