CHAPTER TWO
Freya
Now
By the time Theo loses his other school shoe, I’m already running late. It’s always the bloody left one. Always. Like his shoes have a secret agreement: one behaves, the other goes rogue just to see how far it can push me before I crack. Spoiler alert: I’m cracking.
I find it eventually under the sofa, wedged behind a toy dinosaur missing its tail; a casualty of an earlier, more imaginative battle. I hold the shoe up triumphantly like I’ve just uncovered buried treasure.
“Found it,” I call, huffing out a breath, relieved that a shoe has not caused me to lose my shit two days in a row. Theo cheers as if I’ve achieved something heroic rather than located footwear he was wearing approximately eight minutes ago.
Mornings in our house are loud. Not chaotic exactly, just full.
Full of movement and questions and reminders shouted between rooms. Full of toast crumbs and half-finished cups of tea and the low-level hum of me trying to keep everything running smoothly on my own.
There is always something misplaced or half-done. Usually by both of us.
I don’t hate it. Most days, I love it. I just wish it didn’t sometimes feel like a performance. Like I’m spinning plates and pretending I’m not watching them wobble and more often than not, fall.
We leave with seconds to spare. Theo skips ahead of me, backpack bouncing, energy spilling into the street like he’s powered by something stronger than cereal.
I, on the other hand, could do with another coffee.
Though I’m not sure there’s enough coffee in the world to energise me to the level of that kid.
Oakwood is already awake. Mums clustered by the gates. Prams squeaking along pavements. Kids darting between legs.
Oakwood Primary sits at the heart of it all, solid and red-bricked and comfortingly unchanged since I went there as a kid.
“Good morning, sunshine!” Clara calls from the gate.
Her hair is scraped back into a perfect ponytail, coat zipped neatly, lipstick the same shade she wears most days.
Ollie and Mabel tug at her hands impatiently.
Her husband, Mark, stands behind her, relaxed, smiling at the scene like he belongs exactly where he’s standing.
I smile automatically.
Clara has always called me sunshine. She says I brighten rooms. I’m not sure that’s been true for a while, but it still warms something in me when she says it.
Theo runs off without looking back. I watch him go, heart swelling and tightening all at once.
He is the best thing I have ever done. All soft edges and endless questions and bright blue eyes that notice more than I sometimes want him to.
Being his mum is the most certain thing in my life.
Even on the days it feels impossibly heavy.
“You’re doing that thing again,” Clara says gently.
“What thing?”
“The staring. Like you’re trying to memorise him.”
I shrug. “He changes so fast.”
“Any news from James about the baby?” she asks quietly.
The question lands heavier than she intends.
“No,” I say after a pause. “Which is probably for the best. I’d rather not know for as long as possible.”
James and I lasted just over two years. Most of that time I spent wondering whether I was ever enough for him, until the day he confirmed I wasn’t.
It wasn’t dramatic. No smashed plates or shouted accusations.
Just a message lighting up his phone while I stood in the kitchen waiting for the kettle to boil.
It was a name I didn’t recognise and words that assumed familiarity.
A conversation that had been happening without me while I was six months pregnant.
I remember the hum of the fridge. The kettle clicking off. The baby kicking gently inside me while something sharp and irreversible tore our lives apart.
He didn’t deny it for long.
The worst part wasn’t even that he cheated. It was that he did it while I was becoming a mother, while my body was already giving everything it had and trusting him to hold the rest.
He is still with her. She wasn’t a mistake. She was a choice. They are expecting a baby any day now. James is about to witness a birth, to do the things he never quite did for Theo and me, and that is the part that always hurts.
I don’t miss him. But I hate that it happened. I hate that for a while I believed I was the rough draft and someone else became the finished piece.
I walk home alone after drop-off, past houses I’ve known my whole life, past the one across the road from mine. Rory’s old house.
I always slow here. I have since I was a kid.
Dad left me our house when he passed. It had been just the two of us for so long that it was never going to belong to anyone else. And although I’m glad it’s mine and I get to hold onto all of the precious memories that live in these walls, I’d much rather that he was still here with me.
Mum left when I was ten. She fell in love with a Spanish waiter.
All I got was a postcard from Mallorca with no return address.
Dad never said a bad word about her but I made my mind up on my own.
He just packed lunches with notes tucked inside and learned how to plait my hair using YouTube tutorials.
Once, when I cried over a school project that needed a family tree, he drew the two of us with ridiculous hair and said, “Small tree. Strong roots.”
He was steady. Loyal. Unshakeable. I think that’s why James caught me so completely off guard.
I didn’t grow up believing love could be fragile.
I believed that all men were like my dad and that I would one day be lucky enough to have children with a man that would treat our kids like my dad treated me.
Dad died on a Tuesday morning from a heart attack. It was quick, cruel, unfair. One minute he was reminding me to check the oil in my car, the next I was standing in a hospital corridor at twenty-two being told there was nothing they could do.
Twenty-two. No mum. No dad. Just me, a set of house keys and a grief that felt too big for my years.
I hang my keys on the crooked hook he installed and never fixed.
“This one’s still doing its best,” I murmur to the empty hallway.
I make myself a coffee and open my phone. The headline is already there.
RORY BENNETT. RETURNING HOME. FRESH START.
There’s a photo of him stepping out of a car, head ducked slightly, dark hair untamed, looking like he’d rather be anywhere else.
My stomach tightens before I can stop it.
I haven’t seen him properly in years. Not since before everything got complicated.
Before life pulled us in opposite directions.
It’s weird how someone can be a huge part of some chapters of your life and then not exist in the next.
Of all the places in the world to start again, he chose here. Oakwood. Across the road from me. Back in the house he grew up in.
I stare at the photo for a little longer, my coffee cooling in my hand, and I feel something shift quietly under my ribs.
Some stories don’t end when you think they do.
Sometimes they just wait.