"Morning." He yawned.

"Look!" instructed Tallulah. "I'm wearing my wellies. They've got pink flowers on. Look."

"Well done," said Josh, walking to the fridge.

"Wait!" cried Tallulah. "You haven't seen the ones on the back."

"Gosh, sorry," said Josh. "Wow. Wow. Wowee. Those are ay-mazing flowers."

Tallulah smiled. "Told you," she said quietly.

Josh opened the fridge door.

"Blimey," he muttered. "Six pints of milk. Have they ever thought of investing in a cow?"

He turned to them and saw Jo looking at Tallulah's feet.

"Popsie," she said in a soft voice. "You've got them on the wrong feet."

Tallulah stared at her feet and frowned.

I haven't got any other feet," she said, worried.

Jo laughed and took Tallulah's little face in her hands.

"I adore you, piglet"-she kissed her on the cheek-"but you need to swap them over quickly like a big girl, or we'll all be late."

Josh watched as Jo collected Tallulah's packed tea break that she'd prepared earlier and put Zak's football and recorder in his schoolbag. Jo looked over at him.

"Ready?" she asked.

"Yep."

She looked at Tallulah's feet again. Sweetiepie, you've done it again."

Tallulah studied her feet. Then she looked up at Jo, mild panic surfacing on her little face. Jo was busy looking for the car keys.

"I'll do it," said Josh, and slowly crouched down to help Tallulah with her boots. When he finished he looked up at her and found her staring at him intensely. The look seeped through his skin.

"Right, we're off," called Jo. "Are you ready, Josh?"

"I've been ready for an hour, miss," he said. He looked back at Tallulah. "She's scary isn't she?" he whispered.

"Not when you get to know her," answered Tallulah, putting her hand in his and leading him to the front door.

"Right!" yelled Jo to the others. "Come on!"

After Zak and Ca.s.sandra had been deposited at their schools, Tallulah fell asleep and snored magnificently. Alone with Josh in the car, except for Snoring Beauty in the back, Jo felt Shaun's disapproval as plainly as if he were another presence in the car. After a while, she decided the air needed clearing and forced herself to speak.

"Listen," she started. "I'm sorry."

"What about?"

"That night. When I got drunk."

"You're sorry about getting drunk?"

"No." She sighed. He was going to make this difficult. "I'm sorry about the way I told you about Shaun."

Josh snorted. "Jesus, I'd forgotten about that."

"Well I hadn't. And I'm sorry."

"D'you think you've broken my poor little heart or something?"

"No, I just-"

"You just what? Thought I was going to make a play for you?"

"No-"

"Listen, if it's on tap, of course I'm going to go for it. What bloke wouldn't? And you were certainly on tap that night-"

Jo gasped in shock.

"But anything more than that, and you're living in some little chicklit fantasy world. You've seen too many Hollywood films. Sorry to disappoint you."

Jo bit her lip and blinked hard. She didn't trust herself to speak again. They reached Highgate Station in silence. Josh opened the door and slowly heaved himself out of the car.

He stood in the door. "So," she heard him say in the same infuriatingly happy tone. "I'll see you back here as arranged."

"Fine," said Jo, staring ahead of her.

"By the way," he said. "You didn't sound anything like a car with a flat battery." And he slammed the door.

Jo sat for a while, watching him hobble off, tears stinging the back of her eyes. At least she knew where she stood. She'd let her imagination run wild like the complete girl that she was, and now she'd made an absolute fool of herself. She could kick herself; it was the oldest trick in the book and she'd fallen for it. The minute he discovered that he wasn't going to get into her bed, he'd simply dropped the charm offensive and turned into the real Josh-a rude, arrogant b.a.s.t.a.r.d. The kind of bloke who'd call a new nanny on speakerphone to laugh at her with his office colleagues. Thank G.o.d she'd found out before making a big mistake.

Josh felt strangely vulnerable on the tube. People sat so near to each other, his arm was actually touching the arm of the man next to him. He'd forgotten how invasive it all was. From Highgate, the journey was more straightforward than from Crouch End, but far uglier. He was used to buses and overland trains. On the underground, even outside rush hour, people were a different, harder breed, as though all traces of humanity got suffocated in the dark.

The thought of changing from the Northern Line at Tottenham Court Road onto the Central Line, getting off two stops later and still being further away from his office than he was used to, tired him, both physically and mentally. As people rushed past, he felt the need to hold out his arms so that they didn't b.u.mp into him. If he could, he'd have worn an L-plate.

As he progressed, increasingly slowly, toward his office, he felt a familiar depression start to loom. He then realized that he hadn't felt this bad all the days he'd been away from the office. Then it dawned on him that before he'd spent time off from work, he'd felt this bad every single morning. He'd just got used to it.

As he turned into the street where his office block stood, he vowed that he wouldn't let himself get used to feeling this bad again; he'd harness the emotion of last week and use the memory of it to inspire him to change his life.

As he reached his office, he savored his last few minutes of freedom and sunlight. The next eight hours were not his own. He'd sold them to the highest bidder. With a sinking heart, he climbed the grey stone steps to his office.

By lunchtime Josh had got back into the stride of things. The cliche was true, it was like riding a bike. True, he still felt tired and a tad excluded from the office politics that were usually the only fun of his job, but he knew that would only be a matter of time.

When Sally appeared at the corner of his desk, ever so slightly arching her back while a.s.suming a coy air, he looked at her as though she was from another planet.

"Welcome back," she purred.

He smiled at her from behind his desk. It was a very distinct smile, a smile many had made before and many would make again. It said loud and clear, "I am a coward. I do not want to openly tell you It's Over, because that would mean a) making a decision and b) taking control. But you'll get the message and make the decision for me. I thank you."

"I've missed you," she said with a coy air, while arching her back a little more.

Josh made a mental note to work on his smile, while wondering what on earth had possessed him to possess this woman. He felt as though a switch that had once been clicked to on inside his body-the switch that connected every single nerve fiber to his brain with the compelling message "Sally Is a Fox; Must Act"-had been clicked to the off position. There was nothing he could do about it. It was an animal thing.

"Wanna show me your bruises?" she was now whispering.

With some horror, Josh realized showing anyone his bruises was not something he'd ever feel up to doing, least of all to this woman. The last thing his bruises felt like was s.e.xy. In fact, he could feel most of his bodily organs shrinking just remembering how he got them. His phone rang, making him jump, and with an apologetic glance at Sally, he picked it up on the first ring.

"Josh? It's Toby."

"Josh put all his energies into sounding relaxed and chirpy as Sally slowly-and if he wasn't mistaken, coyly, while arching her back-walked away.

"Hiya, how are you doing?" he said into the phone.

There was a long pause.

"Fine," squeaked Toby.

With Sally gone, Josh could focus his mind on the call. He realized his kid brother was trying not to cry, which was making his voice go up by about two octaves.

"What's the matter, mate?" he asked softly into the phone.

Another pause.

"I'm a bit...down," squeaked Toby.

"Course you are, mate. You're thirteen and you're at school. Life's s.h.i.t."

Toby snorted.

"Mind you," Josh went on. "Life doesn't get much better when you're twenty-five and at work, but at least they pay you and you've had s.e.x."

Toby made a strange guttural sound, which almost became a snort of laughter.

A group of fellow schoolboys ran past Toby at the pay phone and he turned himself to face the wall. After they'd pa.s.sed, he put his elbow up on the phone and rested his head in the cup of his hand, hiding his face from the stairs leading to the science labs behind him.

"Are you gonna be at Dad's this weekend?" he sniffed.

"Yeah, I live there now full-time," said Josh. "I told you last weekend, but you were more concerned with pulling Tallulah's hair, as I recall."

"What are you doing Sat.u.r.day?"

Josh paused before he spoke. "Spending the day with my favorite kid brother, that's what."

Another long pause.

"Thanks," squeaked Toby.

"Now, go and wash your face, take a brisk walk, then gratuitously pick on someone smaller than you."

Toby wiped his eyes furiously with his hand.

"See you Friday night," said Josh. "Think of what you'd like to do on Sat.u.r.day."

When he heard the phone ring off at Toby's end, Josh sat brooding on a familiar theme for a while. He hated Toby's school with a vengeance. If he had the money, he'd gladly pay for his kid brother to be at a better one.

He picked up a pencil and started chewing its end. d.i.c.k's disappearance may have been more emotionally scarring for him at fourteen, but for Toby, at two, it had had far more serious implications. Josh had already started his "O" level syllabus at his private school, so d.i.c.k's alimony payment had included that. By the time Toby had been ready to start secondary school, d.i.c.k had been long gone and his once generous alimony didn't stretch nearly as far, private school fees had soared, and their mother still had no new man on the horizon to help bolster up her income. She'd asked Toby whether he wanted to go to a private school or have annual holidays abroad. To n.o.body's surprise but her own, he chose the latter. Now he went to a school where the teachers were frightened of the kids and the kids were terrified of each other. All Josh remembered being scared of at school was exams.

When someone approached Josh to ask him a work query, he took the pencil out of his mouth, concentrated hard, and brought his mind back to the present. He'd almost chewed the pencil end away.

While Josh was dissecting the disturbing facts about Toby's school life for the hundredth time, Toby was putting the phone down and walking, head down, to the toilets. He washed his face with very cold water, stood by the window and waited until it stopped looking like he'd been punched in the eyes by a sixth former. A first year walked in and did a double take.

"What?" demanded Toby gruffly. "Wanna black eye?"

The first year shook his head violently and changed direction sharply from the urinals to a cubicle.

Toby's eyes watered again, and, as he put his face back under the cold water, the first year stood terrified in the cubicle, unable to move and completely unable to perform.

Vanessa was also having considerable problem. Creatives still hadn't called, Max was getting hot under the collar, and she didn't want to think about where she was getting hot.

When the call finally came, she was not best pleased.

"Do you think you're ready for me?" Anthony asked slyly over the phone.

"Do you have some scripts?" she cut in.

It was the first time she'd spoken to Anthony since that night. And she was very angry with him. She'd gone into work the next day not sure whether he'd call her or appear at her office door. Either way, she'd simply have to explain to him firmly and conclusively that what had happened between them had been a drunken mistake and was never going to happen again.

When he hadn't appeared by three o'clock, she started facing the almost inconceivable possibility that he wasn't going to appear at all. Around the crucial ten minutes of 4:50 to 5 p.m., her confusion, shock, and humiliation merged seamlessly into anger. By 5:30 p.m. she was livid.

When he didn't even get in touch the next day, her healthy anger turned into an unhealthy preoccupation, the implications of which were beginning to scare her. She knew she'd have to call him that afternoon at the very latest. Unfortunately, by then she felt so hostile and defensive with him that she knew their relationship was turning into something more tortured and political even than a professional relationship. He had manipulated her emotions, as he had done with so many before her.

She banged her desk suddenly. What the h.e.l.l was she thinking? She was a happily married woman. Or at least, she was a married woman, and it amounted to the same thing. She loved d.i.c.k. That didn't mean she didn't hate him a lot of the time, but that was just marriage, wasn't it? Marriage meant children you adored and pairing your husband's socks in return for memories of the sweet nothings he used to say that you pretend you'll hear again before you die. And she didn't want some office Romeo coming in to break all that up, thank you very much. There was silence on the other end of the phone. Did he have the script or not?

"Or is this a social call?" she asked him, her sarcasm so acidic it could have burnt the phone line.

"Um, yes," said Anthony, all slyness gone from his voice. "We're ready for you."

They arranged the soonest available time for everyone to meet and rang off.

After the call, Anthony stared into the middle distance biting his lower lip for a full five minutes.

This was exactly what he'd been dreading. Vanessa's brittle tone told him she was not happy. But was that because he'd kissed her, because he'd been late with the scripts, or because he hadn't called her after he'd kissed her?