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often used her as a sounding-board for some new proposal or initiative that had been mooted and which he, increasingly, struggled to understand.
    ‘There are some very beautiful parts of the country – Hampshire, Devon, Cornwall. It would be nice to take some trips.’
    Lance laughed. ‘Can you see me whiling away my days in a twee little cottage with a thatched roof?’
    Melissa too laughed at the very thought. ‘No, honey. I can’t.’
    ‘There are a few good years left in me yet.’
    ‘I know that, sweetheart.’ She smoothed the collar of his dinner jacket. ‘We should think about it though. You know how time rushes by. It pays to start making plans. We could retire to Florida, spend our twilight years soaking up the sun. You could even take up golf again if you had the time.’
    Lance used to play once, but only because work had required it. Now, like everything else, it was difficult to find the spare hours.
    ‘Do you think we’d see the boys more if we were retired?’ he asked.
    It was always a difficult subject between them. She was much closer to their sons than Lance was and she felt that, not too far below the surface, he resented that. ‘Oh, yes. I’m sure we would. Or we could visit them.’
    What she meant was that she could visit them alone. Lance would never bother, even if he was retired. And that was why he wasn’t closer to the boys.
    His ‘Harrumph’ was the only answer she needed.
    The children were grown-up now, men not boys, both nearing thirty, and they had lives of their own. Rich and interesting lives. It was a great sadness in her life that they rarely saw them.
    ‘Are they coming for Christmas this year?’ he asked.
    ‘No, no,’ Melissa said. ‘But I’m sure they’ll Skype us.’ It might be Christmas, but the only time she’d have with her children would be a rushed five-minute phone or video call from some distant part of the world.
    Drew and Kyle had spent most of their young lives in boarding school. A good one in England, all funded by Fossil Oil. At least it had given them some stability at the time, but she regretted that now. She had tried to keep them at home with her as they followed Lance to his different postings around the globe. It gave Melissa a home life too, a life outside Fossil Oil. She loved doing the school run, waiting for the boys to come home so that she could read with them, play games. It gave an otherwise shallow existence some meaning. But it wasn’t ideal for the boys. They had to change schools so often that their education suffered. They’d just start to settle in, make friends with their classmates, there’d be tentative and awkward play-dates or they might start to get invites to birthday parties at burger bars, and then Lance would announce that they were off again. They were always the outsiders and that was never a good feeling. She knew that only too well. It had been a terribly painful decision to leave them behind as she trailed after Lance. And she wondered now how she could have packed them off so young. Boys needed their mother’s love. They needed a father who was there for them and Lance had never been. Yet, despite their parents’ failings, thankfully they’d turned out to be decent, caring young men.
    ‘They should have come into the oil business with me,’ Lance said. ‘That’s a proper career. They’re both layabouts.’
    ‘They’re so not,’ Melissa chided. ‘They just want different things to you. There’s nothing wrong with that. They want to be their own people. Money doesn’t matter to them.’
    ‘They don’t mind taking ours,’ Lance grumbled.
    Melissa had done her very best to steer them away from the corporate game and it seemed to have worked. She’d never wanted them to grow up to be their father’s sons. She and Lance might have all the trappings of wealth, but the truth was they had no life.
    The opposite was true of their sons.
    ‘Drew does great work,’ she said. ‘You know that. You should