So once Hitesh had left the choice had been an easy one, and within a few seconds Ellen had found herself lost once again in the heat of that locked room, struggling along with Eliza to fight her barely understood desires for a man she ought to hate, yet yearned to have.

  Then Charlie had talked about erection metaphors and asked her about the school skiing trip and Ellen was firmly back in the last place she wanted to be, the real world.

  ‘There is no money,’ Hitesh had told her, sitting at her kitchen table. He spoke kindly, slowly, as if he wanted to be sure that she was really understanding him.

  ‘None?’ Ellen questioned. ‘But the insurance, the appeal – you said …’

  ‘I said I’d try, and I have – you know that I’ve been on the case since they first refused to pay out, months ago, fighting with them for the best part of a year,’ Hitesh reminded her, sipping the glass of cold lemonade she had poured him, loosening the top button of his shirt. ‘Nick was insured up to the hilt, if he’d got cancer or been run over by a bus you’d be fine, sorted for life. But it was death by dangerous driving, Ellen, his dangerous driving. Look, I know you don’t need to hear all this again – but the skid marks on the tarmac, the distance from the road they found the car, the state of the wreck. The level of blood alcohol. It showed he took that bend at around a hundred and twenty miles an hour and he was just above the legal limit for drinking. I’ve come to the end of the line, there is no other appeal process or arbitration board I can go to. The insurance company doesn’t care about you, Ellen, or your mortgage, or the years of premiums Nick paid. It doesn’t pay out on death caused by reckless behaviour. You won’t be getting any money from them. I’m sorry, but we need to face that and work out what to do next.’

  Ellen twisted her wedding ring around and around her finger. She could hear Hitesh, but nothing he said seemed real. For the last year she had just carried on as normal, financially at least. She and Nick had had almost twenty thousand pounds in a savings account which Hitesh had helped her transfer into her household account to tide her over until the insurance money came through. It was meant to be a temporary measure, but month after month had passed and still there was no payout. Everything, the mortgage, the electricity, gas and whatever else there was had all been paid by direct debit from the household account. Ellen hadn’t even thought to check the dwindling balance, confident that everything would be resolved. But now Hitesh was telling her that that money was running out. And then what?

  ‘Hitesh, the money transferred from our savings account – it’s nearly all gone? Won’t there be anything left from the business?’ Nick had run a small but successful advertising agency, or at least he’d always told everyone, including Ellen, how well it was doing. When the recession hit he’d pointed to their five-bedroom Victorian villa and his Mercedes on the drive and told Ellen not to worry.

  ‘Advertising is recession-proof,’ he’d assured her, planting a kiss on her forehead. It had fallen to Hitesh, not only Nick’s accountant but also the executor of his will, to spend the best part of the last year winding up his business affairs, a complicated, murky affair that Ellen did not even want to attempt to understand.

  ‘Wages, rent, bills – Nick was behind on all of them and he was late paying his taxes. I’d got him some wriggling time with the Revenue to sort out his cash flow, but he … didn’t manage it. Most of what little capital there was in the business has gone to them, you’re lucky that you’re not left owing anyone any money.’

  ‘It’s just … I don’t see how – is it really that bad?’ Ellen was disbelieving. ‘Nick never mentioned anything to me, he never gave the impression that things were tough, that we should economise.’

  ‘You know Nick, he was a traditional man. He never wanted to worry you, and if he hadn’t had the accident you probably would have never known. He’d have got all of this sorted out and everything back on track.’ Hitesh smiled fondly. ‘I don’t know how, but he always did.’

  ‘Do you mean we’ve been in this sort of mess before?’ Ellen asked him edgily, uncertain if she wanted to know that the tranquillity and certainty of her married life had been compromised earlier.

  ‘Now,’ Hitesh avoided answering, ‘I’ve had a look at your expenses. The interest-only mortgage you took out on this place is sizeable, if you tried to borrow that much these days no bank would give you the time of day. And you’re tied into a fixed rate for another three years which is a shame because interest rates have plummeted, you’d be paying a fraction of what you are now if Nick had gone for a tracker. Should you try and sell and repay the loan, the redemption fee runs into the thousands, so …’

  ‘What? What can I do?’ Ellen asked him. For the first time, the reality of her situation was nudging its way into her consciousness. All she had concentrated on in the months since Nick’s death was living from minute to minute without him, and that had been more than enough for her to deal with, it still was. And now time had run out, now she would have to do something for herself, she would have to find a way to cope with this situation – and she had no idea how to. Ellen twisted her fingers into a tight knot in her lap, feeling panic gripping her chest.

  Hitesh paused, and Ellen wasn’t sure if it was the warm day that made him so uncomfortable, or what he knew he had to tell her.

  ‘Right – well let’s look at the facts. This house is a good size, well located – you and Charlie could move out and rent it out, enough to cover the mortgage until you can sell up and pay it off without charges. You’d still need to find a way to support yourself and Charlie, of course, but rent on a two-bedroom place will be a fraction of your current costs and …’

  ‘Rent out our home to another family? Move out, you mean?’ Ellen swallowed, her mouth suddenly parched.

  ‘Well no, you won’t get the same revenue from renting it whole as if you rent it room by room to young professionals or perhaps students. What you’re looking for is to maximise your assets. Now, it’s a bit hooky renting without converting the mortgage to a buy-to-let, but I know a letting agent who’d deal with it on the q.t….’

  ‘But this is home.’ Ellen barely heard her own voice as she whispered the words. ‘It’s Charlie’s home, his safe place. You know how he’s been since the accident. But at least he has his home, his room, his things around him. I can’t take that away from him too. I can’t.’

  Hitesh had sighed, pinching the top of his nose between his thumb and forefinger, closing his eyes briefly. When he opened them he held Ellen’s gaze, making her look him in the eye.

  ‘Ellen, you know Nick was a friend of mine. Shamilla and I consider you and Charlie like family. I don’t want to see you in this position, if there was anything else I could do I would do it, I promise you – but there isn’t. Nick thought he was invincible, he never thought he was made of flesh and blood like the rest of us. He knew that everything was riding on him coming up with the goods, pulling off a miracle like he always did – it was that kind of risk he thrived on. But this time he couldn’t make everything all right. And even though he didn’t mean to, he’s left you in a mess. Now, if you want to stay in that house without it being repossessed then you either need to come up with two and half thousand pounds a month pronto just to survive, or you need to think again. And when I say pronto, I mean it – you don’t have enough money in your account to pay next month’s mortgage payment.’ Hitesh leaned forward, his voice softening. ‘I’m sorry to be harsh, but there it is. I have to make you see. Is there anyone else who could help you – I know Nick’s parents are dead but perhaps yours … ?’

  ‘They don’t have any money,’ Ellen told him, thinking of her mum and dad in their chilly bungalow in Hove, surviving on the state pension and very little else.

  ‘Then you need another plan.’ Hitesh paused. ‘Look, take today to think about your options. Talk it over with someone. If you find another way then great, if not come back to me and I’ll put you in touch with that letting agent.’

  And Ellen had taken some time. But she had chosen not to think. How could she? How could she think about something that was as incomprehensible and irreversible as Nick’s death?

  If only Nick were here. The thought escaped her before she could do anything to stop it.

  *

  ‘Well?’ Charlie asked her. ‘Can I?’

  ‘I don’t know yet,’ Ellen hedged. ‘I need to think about it. It’s a long way away and you’ve never been skiing before. I’m not sure if I want you so far away, it sounds dangerous to me …’

  ‘Climbing the stairs sounds dangerous to you,’ Charlie complained, frustrated. ‘Mum, if you don’t let me go everyone will think I’m a gay mummy’s boy. They’ll think I’m on free school dinners or a chav! You have to stop treating me like a kid. I’m not going to die you know, I’m not Dad.’

  Ellen dipped her head, feeling the warmth of the manuscript beneath her fingers, as if the heat between Eliza and Captain Parker was escaping between the lines. Just a few flimsy pages away, another world – without debt, or dead husbands or angry boys who didn’t know what they were saying or why – was waiting for her. A world where intensely passionate men stole you from your problems and ravished you into delirious submission, conquering you with their love. A world where you didn’t have to do anything except be irresistible. How could she explain to Charlie that even though she knew he wasn’t his dad, even though she knew it was highly unlikely that she would lose him as suddenly and as violently as she had lost Nick, she couldn’t convince her heart to feel the same way.

  ‘So, what would you like for tea tonight?’ Ellen asked him, weary from the constant onslaught of emotional battles that raged on in her head.

  Since Nick had died Charlie had only eaten the same thing that he had on the last day he saw his father alive: fish fingers, white bread, tomato ketchup and Frosties with semi-skimmed milk. She’d seen in turn a doctor, a child psychologist and a dietitian and all of them had said that the best thing was to let him get on with it as long as his health wasn’t being compromised, but every time she fed him something from that all-too-short list, it was Ellen who felt like a failure. A mother who couldn’t even nourish her own son, either with the kind of food he should be eating or the love and security he needed to feel in order to eat it. It was proof that no matter how much she tried to fight it Charlie had been steadily drifting away from her since they had lost Nick, each day edging a little further out of her reach. It wasn’t just the money that made it difficult for her to say yes to this skiing trip. It was the thought of him travelling so far away from her that she couldn’t stand. Ellen didn’t think that Charlie blamed her for his father’s death exactly. It was more that he seemed disappointed with his remaining parent. From being a quiet loving little boy he was now striving more and more each day to be entirely independent from his mother, and Ellen was sure that the skiing trip was part of that too, another thing he could do without her. The more he struggled to be free of her, the more she wanted to bind him to her, to keep him that same adoring little boy who held her hand at Nick’s funeral.

  Charlie dipped his head, his shoulders heaving in a sigh, and then after a second or two he put his arms around Ellen’s neck and hugged her, leaning his body into hers. She tensed, taken off guard by the gesture of affection that had become so unfamiliar to her, missing the opportunity to return the embrace before Charlie withdrew.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mum,’ he told her, through lowered lashes. ‘I’m sorry I’m a pain sometimes. I don’t know why I say the stuff I do. I’m an idiot.’

  ‘No you are not.’ Tentatively, gently, Ellen put her hands on Charlie’s shoulders and looked into his eyes. ‘Charlie, this last year – we’ve had a lot to deal with, you and I. And you, you have been anything but an idiot. You’ve been an amazing, strong, brave little boy …’ She winced inwardly at her choice of words. ‘Learning to get on without Dad. It’s hard for us both and sometimes we do and we say things we don’t mean to. None of it matters if we love each other and stick together.’

  Charlie held her gaze for a second as if he wanted to say something more, something important. But instead he shrugged and stepped out of her embrace.

  ‘Anyway, I don’t care if the boys at school think I’m a gay, pikey, chav,’ he told her bullishly, that relic of sweet boyishness passing as quickly as it had arrived. ‘It doesn’t really matter if I don’t go skiing, I suppose. Emily Greenhurst isn’t going and she plays the electric guitar.’

  ‘The electric guitar. Really?’ Charlie nodded. ‘Charlie, I’ll be honest. I don’t know about the holiday. It’s a lot of money and we’re still sorting out our finances,’ Ellen hedged. There was one person she could ask for help to pay for the holiday, even if the thought of letting Charlie go horrified her. These school holidays were always supersafe, Ellen told herself, despite her instinctive misgivings. The schools had to make sure they were these days … although hadn’t there been that case on the news a few weeks back about a boy drowning in a canoeing accident? Ellen stifled her anxiety, she didn’t want him to be the only one of his friends who missed out, even if this mysterious Emily Greenhurst wasn’t going. Ellen knew that her younger sister Hannah would give her the money if she was prepared to ask for it, she just wasn’t sure that she was, not even for Charlie. Hannah, the bright, beautiful, successful one had made it her business to be around for Ellen a lot since Nick died, she offered time and time again to help Ellen out with the bills, or take her and Charlie out for a treat – and Ellen knew that she should have been touched and grateful by her younger sister’s concern, but she struggled to be. Hannah had always glided through life so effortlessly, the world falling into place around her. For most of her existence Ellen had felt as if she were trailing along behind her little sister, plodding through life while Hannah blazed a trail, like a bright shooting star. And then Ellen had met Nick and for the first time in her life she had something that Hannah didn’t. A loving relationship, a husband and a son, a proper family home. And as foolish and shallow as it was, while she had those things Ellen had felt like her sister’s equal, her superior even, ensconced as she was in the ‘real’ business of raising a family while Hannah flitted through city life, a dedicated career woman with plenty of money and loads of stuff but no one who really loved her and no one she really loved back. But now all but one of Ellen’s treasures had either gone or were on the brink of being lost, and it would cost her a lot to turn to Hannah for help. Even for Charlie.

  ‘I’ll try my best, OK? And in the meantime please don’t call people chavs or pikeys. Or gay, not if you’re using it as an insult.’

  ‘But it’s OK if you’re using it as a compliment?’ Charlie quizzed her. ‘Like, oh Simon Harper, you are so wonderfully gay!’

  ‘Charlie,’ Ellen repressed a smile. ‘You are nearly twelve years old. You know what’s wrong and what’s right – try and stick to it, OK?’

  ‘OK,’ Charlie grinned. ‘I actually think Simon Harper is gay though.’

  ‘So fish fingers?’ Ellen smiled, ever hopeful that one day he’d change his answer.

  ‘Yes please, Mummy.’

  Ellen didn’t know what broke her heart more, the scars left by his father’s death or the fact that sometimes, just for a fleeting moment her little boy forgot to be all grown up.

  Chapter Two

  ‘Well, I would have thought it was obvious,’ Hannah said, stirring her third spoonful of sugar in her black coffee. Ellen’s sister, younger than her by some nine years, lived on coffee, cigarettes and sugar and looked annoyingly good on it. ‘Slender as a willow tree and just as bendy’ was how she’d been known to introduce herself to potential lovers, which was pretty much any male within a five-mile radius. ‘You have to do what that accountant says. You have to consolidate, let the place out and get somewhere small for you and Charles. I mean, Ellie, it’s only a pile of bricks. It’s not even as if you and Nick lived here all your married life, as if he carried you over the threshold on your wedding day. You’ve only lived there a few years and I never did get why you bought such a huge place when there was only ever going to be the three of you …’ Hannah faltered, realising that she had put her foot in her mouth yet again, and stirred her beverage furiously, unable to meet Ellen’s eye for a moment. Both of them knew that when Ellen and Nick had bought the house they planned to fill it with children, a real family home for a real family. But circumstances had changed and that had become an impossibility long before Nick died. Ellen smarted inwardly. It was just like her sister to hit on a phrase that could wound her the most, calling her home a pile of bricks. It was so much more than that: it was symbolic, of what her life used to be – of what it should have been.

  ‘Anyway – it’s just a place,’ Hannah stumbled on. ‘A reminder of everything that you’ve … lost. A fresh start – that’s exactly what you need. If anything that house is a burden and it’s one you need to be shot of.’

  Ellen said nothing for a moment. Despite Hitesh’s constant reminders that she needed to make a decision, it had taken her two days since his visit to bring herself to call her sister, and of course she hadn’t really invited Hannah over for coffee to listen to her opinion or advice. The two women were so different in every respect that before Nick had died they barely saw or spoke to each other apart from required occasions; birthdays, Christmas – that sort of thing. After his death, though, Hannah had been around much more, which Ellen supposed that she ought to be touched by, her kid sister making an effort to be there for her when neither of them really liked or understood the other. But Ellen didn’t get that feeling from Hannah: for some reason it felt like Hannah wanted to be around her and Charlie for her own sake, as if she needed distracting from Nick’s death. Not long after the funeral, when Ellen had been at her lowest point, Hannah had found her lying in her room, her head buried beneath the pillow, and had carefully sat on the edge of the bed.