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him. It’ll be strange. You spend more time with him during school hours than I do.’ His smile is half questioning, but it’s not something I’m prepared to get into – not today. Finn is not himself in school, seems attention seeking; but then again, that’s probably only to be expected.

      ‘Right. I should get back.’ He taps his hands, palms down, on the edge of the table, then stands. ‘You want that hug?’ His eyes, the same colour as the casual khaki-coloured trousers he wears today, rest on mine.

      We embrace. He holds me tight. I catch a whiff of his aftershave, and all I can think of is Anna. I close my eyes, pretend that this moment of closeness is with her; pretend that it’s her scent – a floral, sweet one rather than a musky one – that I’m inhaling. I have to stop myself clinging to him.

      ‘This time last year, remember the night?’ he whispers.

      I do remember. A crowd of us went out to celebrate my birthday and I ended up dancing on the table. It was a night for Sean to have Rose, and Anna had called to collect me in a cab after being out with her own friends. ‘Taxi for drunk mother!’ she had called into the pub.

      ‘It’s good to think of fun times,’ he says.

      Theo seems to know the exact picture I have flooding through my brain. He rests his hand on the top of my back and, for a brief second, I think he’s going to say something profound, something that might make a difference – some insight into how I’m going to handle this all-consuming, exhausting, loss. Instead he says, ‘It’s shit, Jess. Nothing I say will make it better, but I will keep on trying.’

      His remark’s not profound but, somehow, it helps.

      It’s ten forty. I’m lying in bed on the night of my forty-eighth birthday. My mother has left two answerphone messages for me, neither of which I have felt able to respond to. My ex-husband sent me a text telling me he is thinking of me. My only sister is mad at me for walking away from her this morning and cancelling dinner tonight. My beloved granddaughter is in another country with her father and his parents. My friend’s marriage is over and, though he still wants to help me, I’m not sure anyone can. It’s Anna I want to hear from.

      I snap a Valium from a pack Theo prescribed. Tonight, I need to sleep.

       I’m floating on an airbed on a calm sea, rising and falling with the gentle ebb of the dark blue ocean – the colour of her eyes … I recognize the beach from a holiday we’d taken years ago – Doug, me and Anna. She’s there, on the sand, and she’s waving to me. I’m so thrilled to see her that I slide from the airbed, begin to swim back to shore. All the while, she’s laughing and waving, calling to me, ‘Mama! I’m here!’ And as I swim as fast as my limbs will allow, I’m crying, thinking, ‘She’s not missing, after all. Look! There she is, you can see her.’

       I stop swimming, tread water for a moment, am frustrated as I don’t seem to be nearing her. ‘Mama!’ she continues to call. ‘Over here!’ And then I see it, a huge sea of white behind her. It’s moving quickly and I’m confused. How can a white wave be coming for her? I’m the one in the sea. When it swallows her whole, I feel myself sinking underwater. As I fall, I tell myself she’s still alive, but I know … I know she would never have left Rose.

      I wake, groggy. My face is wet.

      I cannot cry, but every night I seem to swallow the sea and the salt water escapes through my eyes.

       2. Anna

      Raw Honey Blogspot 02/09/2013

      I love to sing! Anyone who knows me knows it; whether I’m white-wired into my phone on a Tube full of strangers looking at me oddly, or doing my thing from the back row of the choir. I’m the one in the karaoke bar who doesn’t need to look at a screen to know the words. I’m the one driving along singing at the top of my voice to the radio. I still use the hairbrush as a mic in the mirror. I know. Sad, but true.

      My darling daughter (DD) has definitely inherited this need to sing from me. That and long legs. She’s just exhausted me for the last forty minutes; insisting on wearing every hat in my collection (over forty last count) while she sashayed around my bedroom on those legs, singing to Katy Perry’s ‘Roar’. We did the chorus together and she does a good tiger roar, DD; seems to ‘get’ the story of the song; seems to want to tell the world that even at four years old, she’s not going to take any shit from anyone. I love that in her.

      Afterwards, we have quiet time. Ten minutes with her in her bed and a book of her choice, where I read fairy tales with hopelessly happy endings that I dare to believe in too. And when she wraps those tiny arms around my neck and whispers ‘Goodnight, Mummy,’ my heart melts.

      Mama is right. There’s nothing quite like it. That love that you get from a child; where they look to you for everything, to fill their every need. It’s brilliant. It fills me up. Her laugh, her smile, her giggle, her sunny nature. I am quite biased but she’s quite perfect.

      And she’s like her dad: that enquiring mind, those inquisitive eyes, though they’re the same colour as mine, they pucker at the edges just like his. Those eyes were the first thing I ever noticed about Him. That first look, that first day we were introduced, He seemed to stare right into me. I felt exposed, vulnerable. Then He smiled and let me know that whatever it was that He’d seen, there in my soul, that it was beautiful; that I was beautiful and that He could see it.

       Comment: Crash-bambam

      I’ve just had my first baby and know exactly what you mean about a mother’s love. There’s times I feel totally overwhelmed by it all!

       Reply: Honey-girl

      Just try to slow everything down and enjoy. It gets easier, I promise!

       Comment: Idiotlove

      Where’d you meet him, the soul-searcher guy? Know any more like him?! I’m such an idiot in love (note blog name) and have never, ever, felt a connection like that. That thing where you feel someone instantly knows you? You’re really lucky.

       Reply: Honey-girl

      We’re not together any more, but He was special …

       3. Theo

      Theo Pope could recall the exact moment he knew his marriage was over. It was the night that Leah had phoned him with the news that Anna and a friend of hers were missing after an avalanche and two people from the ski party had already been confirmed dead. Harriet, his wife of twelve years, had been beside him, folding linen. Shock had registered on her face and she had made the right noises at the news, sympathetic sounds for Jess and her family. The pillowcases were folded into four, their creases pressed down with her palm; all the while, one eye had lingered on her BlackBerry. Theo had thought it odd; remote and detached from the unfolding tragedy.

      Johnny Mathis was singing about a child being born on the television. The Christmas tree lights that Theo had been fixing on his lap had fallen to the floor, some twinkling as expected, some stubbornly refusing. He had gone to Jess’s immediately, and when he got back after seeing her and her ex, Doug – both devastated beyond words, both readying to drive through the night to the tiny village in the Queyras area of the French Alps – he had heard Harriet on her phone. She was in the den at the back of the house, oblivious to the fact that he’d come home. He heard her whispered tone, her soft giggle. He imagined her on the other side of the door that he rested his forehead on. She would be sitting back, cross-legged, on the leather sofa. The phone would be in her left hand and she would be playing with her hair with her right; her forefinger rolling some strands of straight auburn hair, round and round itself.

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