CHAPTER NINE
EMMA
Dan’s arm is around my waist.
It’s been a while since he’s done it like this, not a quick touch in passing, not a foot brushed against mine under the duvet, but the full, steady weight of him pulling me in like he’s claiming space.
“I’ve got you,” he whispered.
My body believed him before my brain did.
I soften into him. My back presses to his chest, his breath warm at the nape of my neck. He smells like soap and that faint, familiar aftershave that used to mean night out and me in a dress and him looking at me like he couldn’t wait to get me home.
That’s the inconvenient truth.
I still want him.
Even now. Even when I’m exhausted and my hair is greasy and I’ve heard “Mum” so many times it’s lost meaning. Sometimes his hand lands on my hip and my body sparks to life like it remembers us better than I do.
But wanting isn’t the same as reaching.
Reaching feels risky. Because if I turn to him and he’s not really there, not fully, it’ll hurt more than the distance.
So I lie still and let him hold me.
For a few seconds it feels like the beginning of something.
And then Ruby coughs in the baby monitor and my whole body tenses automatically. Like a wire pulled taut.
Dan’s arm tightens, soothing. He’s trying.
I know he is.
That’s the problem with a slow decline, you don’t notice it happening. It doesn’t arrive with a bang. It creeps in quietly, disguised as normal.
It shows up in the most ordinary things.
Like realising the last text Dan sent was just the word:
bin
Or that I can’t remember the last time we kissed properly. Not a peck in the chaos. A real kiss. The kind that used to mean something. The kind that used to make my stomach flip and my pulse rise.
I stare into the dark, listening to his breathing.
We did try. God, we tried.
We clung to the pact like it was a life raft.
At first, we were almost smug about it.
Look at us. Still us-ing.
Once a week, date night. Non-negotiable.
Sometimes it was out. Drinks. Cinema. A mildly disappointing but enthusiastic fumble in the car like teenagers, laughing into each other’s mouths because it felt ridiculous and familiar all at once.
Other times it was in. Candles. Takeaway. A film we barely watched because we were too busy trying to pretend we had the energy to be romantic.
We’d sit on the sofa at 8 p.m. forcing ourselves awake.
“Okay,” Dan would say, putting his phone face down. “Date night.”
And I’d smile at him, determined.
He’d look at me with that hopeful softness that still makes my chest ache.
And for a while… it worked.
Until the monitor crackled.
Until Sophie appeared in the doorway with an emergency that was not an emergency.
“Mummy, my teddy is looking at me weird.”
Or Oscar, whisper-shouting like that made it better.
“Dad. I need to tell you something about dinosaurs. It’s important.”
By the time we’d got everyone back down, the food was cold, the candles were pathetic wax puddles, and Dan was rubbing his temples like he’d aged five years in one hour.
We didn’t say it out loud, but we both thought it.
This is more trouble than it’s worth.
We tried intimacy too.
Quiet, exhausted sex that was more about proving we still could than actually wanting it. Sometimes it felt nice; the closeness, the reminder that we were more than co-parents. Sometimes it felt like another task, another thing to squeeze into a day that already didn’t fit.
The rare times we got close to a moment, something always happened.
One night we actually got as far as kissing, proper kissing, and Dan paused mid-breath.
“Did you hear that?”
We froze.
Silence.
Then, from the hallway:
“Mummy? I did a poo but forgot to wipe.”
Dan buried his face in my shoulder like he might scream.
I laughed so hard I nearly cried.
Another time we did have sex, actual, proper sex, but we were both so determined to finish before an interruption that it was possibly the most joyless, robotic shag of all time.
Afterwards, Dan lay there for a second, staring at the ceiling, then said quietly:
“That felt… productive.”
Productive.
Sex had become productive.
Sleep was sexy now.
Then we tried to do “real” date nights, out-out, and that’s where reality properly came for us.
Because childcare.
People love to say, Just get a babysitter. Like they’re ordering a pizza.
We don’t have the kind of family you can rely on.
Dan’s parents are both gone. His dad died when he was young in a fishing accident; the kind of tragedy that lives in the background of a family forever.
His mum died of cancer not long after Dan and I first got together, which meant there was never that gentle slide into grandparent help.
No “drop them round.” No emergency backup.
My parents are here, technically, but not in a way that counts.
My dad’s diabetes has left him disabled. My mum is drowning caring for him, still working full time, trying to keep them afloat. She doesn’t have the energy to take on three children. She barely gets time to sit down herself.
So it was friends. Mum friends. My sister.
And everyone meant well. Everyone wanted to help.
But life with kids is a constant, contagious mess.
We’d plan a night. Actually plan it. Feel that tiny spark of hope.
Then the messages would start.
Lou: Sorry, my little one’s got a temperature.
Freya: Think we’ve caught another bug, maybe next time?
Clara: Mark is stuck at work. Sorry!
Every time, I’d type:
No worries! Honestly! Another time!
And pretend it didn’t sting.
Eventually, the plans got rarer. Not because we didn’t want them. Because it became too exhausting to hope.
The one babysitter we could count on was Hannah.
My sister. Single. No kids. The woman who still books last-minute holidays and can leave the house with nothing but her keys and her eyelashes.
Hannah was solid. Once she said yes, she meant it. It would take something genuinely catastrophic for her to cancel.
She’s brilliant with the kids too; patient and firm in a way that makes them behave like tiny angels, which is both helpful and deeply suspicious.
And she works at Oakwood Primary, which means she has this calm, teacher energy that makes her seem like she has a secret manual I never received.
Sometimes I wonder if looking after thirty children all day is exactly why she hasn’t had her own. But we’ve never talked about that properly.
Mostly I’m just grateful she exists.
I remember one of the rare nights everything aligned.
Hannah was free. Dan and I had booked a table. I had even planned to wash my hair like a woman with a social life.
Getting ready with three kids around, though, was like trying to apply eyeliner in a hurricane.
Dan, of course, managed to shower in complete peace.
He strolled out of the bathroom fresh-faced and smug, towel wrapped low, so very low on his waist, smelling unreal, looking hot as fuck. The kind hot that used to make me pull him back into the bedroom just to see what happened.
My body noticed. Immediate. Annoyingly alive.
Meanwhile I was holding Ruby on my hip, trying to put mascara on with one hand while Sophie spun around in the dress I’d laid out.
“Mummy,” she announced, inspecting herself in the mirror, “I don’t think you should wear this. It’s mine now.”
“Oscar,” I groaned, “stop licking the…”
“MUM!” he shouted. “If a T-Rex and a Spinosaurus had a fight, who would win?”
“I don’t know!” I snapped, dabbing at my face as Ruby grabbed my shoulder and smeared toothpaste down my top.
Great.
“Dan,” I called, “can you take Ruby for a second?”
Silence.
“Dan!”
He appeared in the doorway fastening his watch like the house wasn’t on fire. “Sorry, what?”
He took Ruby, but by then I was already vibrating with stress.
By the time I finally got dressed, I didn’t even want to go.
I sat on the bed, deflated. “I’m not sure I can be bothered.”
Dan frowned. “Are you serious? We’ve been trying to plan this for weeks.”
“I know.” My throat tightened. “But getting ready was a nightmare. I feel gross. I feel rushed. I’d honestly rather put pyjamas on and eat ice cream.”
He exhaled. “Em. We have to leave the house sometimes.”
He was right.
But being right doesn’t make it easy.
Then came the briefing.
Because leaving the kids wasn’t just leaving them. It was handing someone the entire system my brain runs on.
I stood in the kitchen running through it while Hannah watched, eyebrows rising higher with each sentence.
“So Oscar will say he doesn’t need a wee, but he does. You have to make him go or he’ll be up at ten saying it’s an emergency.”
“Got it,” Hannah said, typing notes like she was studying.
“And Sophie will want her door open, but not too open, because then it’s ‘too light.’ Like this.” I held my fingers an inch apart.
Hannah blinked. “Right.”
“And Ruby…if she won’t settle, try ‘Twinkle Twinkle’ but whisper it, and don’t stop too soon or she’ll start crying again.”
Hannah stared at me. “Emma. I love you. But this is… a lot.”
I pressed my fingers to my temples. “I know. It’s just… if they don’t settle properly, we’ll pay for it later.”
Dan walked in jingling the car keys.
“Are we leaving,” he said, “or are we just briefing Hannah all night?”
And there it was.
The gap.
He saw the night out. I saw the aftermath.
We went anyway. Begrudgingly. Me tense, him hopeful.
In the restaurant, candlelight glowed. Wine swirled. Dan looked at me across the table with a smile that was still… him.
“So,” he said. “What’s new?”
I blinked.
New.
I wanted to laugh. I wanted to cry.
“Dan,” I said, “I’ve spent the week cleaning baby sick off my jeans and trying to convince Oscar his shadow isn’t following him on purpose. Nothing is new.”
He nodded, sipping his beer. “Fair.”
We sat there in silence for a second, and I felt it… the tiredness, yes, but also the longing. The wanting to be us again. The wanting to want him without thinking about laundry and forms and whether Ruby needed white noise.
I caved first.
“Okay, but Ruby tried to eat a button today,” I said.
Dan grinned. “Why exactly?”
And just like that, the kids were back on the table. Not because we were boring. Because they’re our shared language now.
We did try. We really did.
But life kept happening.
Babysitters cancelled. Bugs hit. We’d collapse into Netflix and fall asleep mid-episode while Dan absentmindedly rubbed my foot with one toe.
Romance at its peak.
At some point, I can’t pinpoint when, I found the notebook.
The one I bought from the stationery shop, gold-edged and optimistic, like pretty paper could save a marriage.
I’d written:
THE LIST
Weekly date night (non-negotiable!)
No talking about kids on date night
Keep flirting alive (texts, bum squeezes)
Make time for intimacy (code for shagging)
Take turns planning surprises
Never go to bed angry
I snorted quietly to myself, the sound bitter and fond all at once.
Non-negotiable.
As if we weren’t negotiating our sanity every day.
It wasn’t one big moment where we gave up.
It was hundreds of tiny ones.
Cupboard doors left half open. Wet towels on the bed. Rewashing the same damp load three times because neither of us remembered it existed.
Even his chewing started to irritate me, the way I could hear it in the quiet and feel irrational rage rise like a heat rash.
We stopped touching in the small ways too. No bum squeezes in the kitchen. No hand on my thigh in the car. No leg draped over his in bed.
Not as a decision.
Just… as a drift.
And the worst part was, attraction didn’t die neatly.
It flickered. Inconveniently. Like a faulty light.
Sometimes Dan would walk past in a T-shirt and I’d get a flash of him before kids. Before responsibility. Before we became two adults carrying separate loads in the same house.
Sometimes he’d look at me like he wanted me and I wouldn’t know what to do with it, because I wanted to be wanted, but I didn’t know how to be touched without feeling like one more person needed something from my body.
And then there were the antidepressants. The numbness. The way orgasms became this far-off concept like a language I used to speak but can’t access anymore.
How do you explain that to your husband without turning it into a diagnosis? Without making it sound like his fault? Without admitting you don’t recognise your own body?
So I didn’t.
I rolled over. I pretended to be asleep. Sometimes he did too.
And slowly, our messages turned into logistics.
Emma: Can you get nappies on the way home?
Dan: Already did.
Emma: Legend.
Dan: Did you pay the gas bill?
Emma: Crap. Doing it now.
Dan: Good save.
Not exactly the stuff of great love stories.
In the dark, Dan’s arm tightens around me again, as if his body knows I’m spiralling.
I breathe out slowly.
We still love each other. That’s never been the question.
The question is: can love survive when it’s always squeezed into the gaps?
And can I learn how to reach for him again, not because I’m supposed to, not because it’s on a list, but because I want to feel chosen…
…before we drift so far that we forget how?
Ruby sighs on the monitor.
Dan shifts, still holding me.
For a moment, I let myself stay.
Not fixed.
Not saved.
Just… held.
And for now, that has to count as something.