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thirty-three in her little yellow Mini with Freddie in the backseat staring, puzzled, silent, out the window. I follow them through the gray front door—
hours
of my short life I wasted locating that exact shade of cloud gray—past the surprisingly tidy hall. Clearly, mother-in-law has been busy and her gray felt slippers sit neatly, incongruously, beside my old knitted moccasin boots. I skirt along the stripped pine floor and into our kitchen, always my favorite room with its wooden units that nearly bankrupted us, the red KitchenAid cake mixer, the big range oven, the Dualit toaster, things I loved so much in a way that Ollie never understood but being Ollie indulged anyway because he’d do pretty much anythingto make me happy. Ping Pong hisses as I pass and bolts out through the cat flap. Charming. Missed you too.
    After the cold and damp of the church, the smell of Jenny burning fish fingers is immensely comforting. (Jenny has many talents but cooking is not one of them. She would happily survive on Marmite toast, Minstrels and precut packaged carrot sticks.) Freddie eats it all up, which makes me curdle with maternal pleasure. It’s good to know that he’s not lost his appetite, that nature’s hardwired imperative for his six-year-old body to run and eat and grow overrides his grief. After some warmed rice pudding topped with half a jar of honey on top—Freddie tells her that’s how much I used to put on, the monkey—they curl up together on the velvet sofa. Freddie’s lids slowly shut as Jenny reads
Tintin in Tibet
, her Captain Haddock voice a dead ringer for Billy Connolly. While he sleeps Jenny cries, stroking his unbrushed mop of curls. I move closer to them, not wanting to frighten her, hoping that somehow, if I wish it hard enough, I will radiate some heat, something that will comfort them, let them know that I am here.
    Ollie and the grannies come back. Jenny does her big bright smile thing that she always does when she’s trying to pretend she’s not been crying, and fools nobody. Freddie doesn’t want her to go. She hesitates, unsure of the protocol, not wanting to disappoint Freddie, not wanting to intrude. Granny Vicki crushes Freddie to that bosom—it’s the Thames flood barrier of bosoms—and Jenny leaves for the apartment she shares with Sam in Camden. I become the dust in the dusty shadows, only brightening again as a button moon rises above the slate rooftops and London’s insomniac skyline glows acid orange. Restless to be back where I belong, I feather down the hall, shaken by the tectonic rumble of my mother-in-law snoring in the spare bedroom, sinus problems having taken a turn for the worse.
    It’s midnight. I want to get back to my side of the bed, the side nearest the bathroom because ever since I had Freddie I’ve neededto go in the night. (No, didn’t do my pelvic floors. Does anyone?) My side of the bed is oddly empty. Odd because I normally go to bed before Ollie, who is prone to watching MTV with a beer in his hand late into the night. But nothing’s normal now, is it? Everything is the same but different, like one of those pictures in Freddie’s puzzle books where you have to spot things that are wrong, like the dog with five legs, the lady with a teapot poking out of her handbag.
    Ollie is not sleeping like he usually does, either, which is like a hibernating grizzly, but twisting and turning, ruching up the bedsheets—the same bedsheets that we slept on together last week—asleep but talking indecipherably, then sitting bolt upright, flicking the light on, getting up, walking to the kitchen, pouring himself a large whiskey, downing it, then staggering through to Freddie’s room, crawling under Freddie’s pirate duvet and, with Freddie stirring slightly in his arms, finally falling asleep. I hover a few inches above them, rising and falling on the valleys of their warm breath like a bird. The night is over in a millisecond. Dawn breaks, Ollie breaks wind, Freddie