Dirty Laundry
CHAPTER ONE
EMMA
I stare at the sink, daring the dishes to wash themselves.
They don’t.
A sippy cup. Three plastic plates crusted with something once edible. A baby bottle. A frying pan with what might be a fossilised fragment of scrambled egg welded to its surface. I should wash them. I need to wash them. But my arms feel like they’re made of wet sand and my brain is wrapped in fog.
Behind me, the TV shrieks with some aggressively cheerful cartoon the kids have already seen a hundred times.
“Get off! That’s my seat!” Oscar shouts.
“It’s not yours! You don’t own the sofa!” Sophie fires back.
Ah yes. The sacred middle cushion. No one knows how it achieved VIP status, but here we are, witnessing another territorial dispute. Oscar, eight, self-appointed ruler of all things. Sophie, six, feral with determination. Honestly, I respect her commitment to chaos.
Upstairs, Ruby starts crying.
I close my eyes. Count to three.
“Emma!” Dan calls.
There it is.
I don’t answer. Maybe if I pretend I didn’t hear him.
“Emma!”
I grip the counter. “What, Dan?”
“She won’t go down.”
Of course she won’t. She’s two. She survives entirely on spite and the residual drips of breastmilk.
“She wants you,” he adds, like that’s the solution.
I turn. He’s in the doorway, rubbing his forehead. His T-shirt is inside out. His hair looks like he’s been attacked by his own hands. He looks exhausted.
Good. So am I.
“She always does,” I mutter, brushing past him.
“Well,” he calls after me, “I’ll just stand here and be completely useless then.”
I don’t rise to it. If I do, this turns into a fight, and I don’t have the energy for another one tonight.
Ruby is standing in her cot, red-faced, dummy flung dramatically to the floor. The second she sees me, her arms shoot up. I scoop her up and she collapses against me instantly, like the last two minutes never happened.
“You just wanted Mummy,” I whisper, bouncing her gently. “You’re turning me into an arsehole, you know that?”
She sighs, content.
Traitor.
Ruby is chaos in human form; a cherub with a side hustle in destruction. Not part of the original plan. A ‘whoops’ that detonated our already-fragile balance. I love her more than oxygen, but some days I fantasise about hiding in the loo with a family-sized chocolate bar and a lock.
Downstairs, the shouting resumes.
“MUMMY! SHE TOUCHED ME!”
“MUMMY! HE brEATHED ON ME!”
I am a twenty-four-hour all-inclusive resort for tiny, demanding guests. Shoes. Hair. Homework. Snacks. Emotional regulation. Snack retrieval. Again.
I love being a mum. I always wanted this.
But I’ve never felt so lonely in my life.
I used to have friends. Proper ones. Now my phone lights up and it’s the school app reminding me that tomorrow is Wear Yellow for Charity Day, which means I need to locate a yellow top by 8 a.m. or apparently ruin my child’s entire life.
Hannah is the only constant. My sister. Single. No kids. Answers immediately. Everyone else replies six weeks later with, Sorry! Just seeing this!
By the time Ruby’s breathing evens out, I lower her back into her cot and creep out.
Dan is waiting in the hallway, arms crossed.
“Unbelievable.”
“What?”
“That took you five minutes.”
“It’s not a competition, Dan.”
“Oh, I know,” he says. “Because if it were, you’d be winning.”
Something in me snaps.
“Oh, piss off.”
His eyebrows shoot up. “Wow.”
I head for the stairs. He follows.
“I’m sick of this,” he says.
“Sick of what?”
“This. You acting like I’m incompetent.”
I laugh, sharp, brittle. The kind that cracks if you press it too hard.
“Dan. I do everything. And you just…” I gesture vaguely, helplessly.
“That’s not fair.”
“Who sorted school uniform? Who remembered Oscar’s rugby snacks? Who booked Sophie’s dentist? Who remembered Ruby eats three times a day?”
“I work, Emma!”
“And I don’t?”
“You know what I mean.”
Do I?
“The milk,” I say. “Did you get the milk?”
He freezes.
“…No. I forgot.”
Of course he did.
“I was busy,” he adds quickly. “It was a long day.”
“So was mine.”
He opens his mouth. Closes it. Tries again. “I’m helping. I took the bins out.”
I stare at him.
“That’s your defence?”
“I’m saying I do things.”
“You do visible things,” I say quietly. “You don’t do the thinking.”
He frowns. “I just don’t get why you’re always so angry.”
There it is.
I swallow, steadying myself.
“I don’t feel like your wife, Dan,” I say. “I feel like your housekeeper. Your PA. The person who makes your life run so you don’t have to think about it.”
He stiffens. “That’s not…”
“And I don’t want to be needed,” I add, my voice wobbling now. “I want to be chosen. To be wanted.”
Silence.
“And I don’t want to hate you,” I say. “But I’m starting to.”
That lands.
We end up on the patio, the cold biting through my sleeves. Dan sinks into one of the chairs, elbows on his knees.
“Is this it?” he asks quietly. “Are we just… like this now?”
The question knocks the air out of me.
“I don’t know.”
He runs a hand through his hair. “I don’t want this.”
“Neither do I.”
The words shake. I hate how much I still want him. How my body still remembers the weight of his arm around me in bed, the way he used to pull me close without thinking.
“I don’t think we’re in love anymore,” I say.
I regret it instantly.
He looks up. Hesitates.
“I don’t know,” he admits.
That hesitation hurts more than a no.
“I don’t want us to just coexist,” I whisper. “I miss you. I miss us. When it was easy. When you looked at me like I was your favourite person.”
Something shifts in his face; panic, maybe. Fear.
“I miss you too,” he says. “I just… I don’t know how to do this right.”
For once, he doesn’t try to fix it. He just sits there. His hand inches toward mine. Stops. Then, awkward, tentative, he takes it.
It’s small. But it’s real.
“We try,” he says. “Properly. Not just surviving.”
I nod, tears slipping free.
Behind us, the house hums with mess and noise and responsibility. The sink still full. The sofa still contested. The thinking still mine.
But out here, for a moment, it’s just us.
Two exhausted people, hands linked, choosing, at least tonight, not to let go.
And maybe that’s where love starts again.