Page 18 of A Manny for Christmas

Toby points towards the door by the fridge. ‘It’s through there. We have a tumble dryer and everything.’

‘Awesome, thanks, mate.’ I ruffle his hair and he beams. ‘What time do you guys have to be at school tomorrow?’ I ask.

‘By eight-thirty,’ Toby says.

I look at my watch. ‘Okay then. We have T-minus-fourteen hours.’

‘What’s tee-minus?’ Toby asks, squinting up at me.

‘It’s what NASA uses to count down the time to rocket launches,’ I tell him. ‘We want to be on time tomorrow, don’t we?’

‘Yeah,’ Toby says, ‘because if everyone in the class is on time, we get to use the climbing frame in the playground at break time.’

I nod. ‘There you go. So we leave at ten past eight tomorrow, and not a second later.’ I cast a wary glance in the direction of Daisy, who is now sucking her thumb and shuddering against Molly’s chest. Lucky little she-devil. ‘I borrowed a car from Angus, and it’sveryfancy. It has heated leather seats and a bluetooth connection to my phone, so maybe we can make a school-run playlist? That way we can listen to your favourite songs, right? And you can teach me the words.’

Daisy pulls her thumb out with a wet noise. ‘Kidz Bop,’ she says, and for some reason my internal alarm bell starts ringing.

‘Excellent,’ I say with an enthusiasm I don’t feel.

But Molly’s telegraphingwell doneto me with her huge blue eyes as she rocks her daughter in her arms, and that’s enough reassurance, all by itself.

7

MOLLY

Isend Max off to unpack and make himself at home while I give the kids their bath. Nothing about this situation is ideal, not least of all the short amount of lead-time before his baptism of fire tomorrow morning, but I needed the weekend to sort out the spare room after Sylvie’s departure.

I realise while I’m rinsing the suds out of Daisy’s hair that I haven’t really thought about the evenings properly. I’ve been working on the assumption that I’ll go to bed earlier than Max, and I’ll be long gone before he gets the kids up. But that still leaves at least a couple of hours in the evenings when the kids are down and we’re both at large.

I say a silent prayer that he has a serious Netflix habit, a functioning laptop, and a penchant for hanging out alone in his bedroom these days.

Because cosy nights watching TV in front of the fire together?

Not happening.

That would be… God, that would be so weird. So triggering. Reminiscent of what seemed at the time to be limitless evenings of foot rubs and sharing a bar of chocolate, or a bottle of wine, or a make-out session.

Yep. Solo Netflix-watching it is.

The kids go down eventually. They were far more interested in talking about Max in the bath than they were in talking to him downstairs. Toby wanted to know how I knew him, how many lives he’d saved in Africa, and how fast the car seats would heat his bum in the morning.

I avoided answering the first couple of questions directly, throwing Max under the bus by suggesting Toby ask him those questions in the morning, and gave him an estimated bum-warming lead time of two minutes.

Daisy asked me if I could please make Max take off all his clothes and put them in the washing machine to get rid of the funny smell. I laughed and told her I’d ask him to wash what I assumed was the offending jumper (there was definitely no smell of mothballs when I sniffed his pecs in our hug yesterday). Now, though, I’m battling an alarmingly vivid mental image of Max peeling off his clothes and sitting in the kitchen in just a pair of clingy white boxer briefs, in the manner of a 1985 Nick Kamen at the laundromat.

Bugger. That is not helpful. Maybe I should turn the thermostat down, just in case he’s tempted to revert to his old ways of wandering around the house semi-clad. He wouldn’t do that now, would he? Not in front of the kids, surely?

Extricating myself from sleepy hugs and delicious kisses and pleas for ‘one more story’, I find Max has set the kitchen table with two place settings, opened a bottle of red I don’t recognise, and organised all the shit that was on the table into a couple of huge piles at one end. Precisely my MO when it comes to tidying. He’s standing in front of the AGA, warming his backside.

‘Thanks,’ I say, glancing at the table before awkwardly nudging him out of the way so I can get the shepherd’s pie out of the AGA.

‘Wow.’ He eyes the pie, whose mashed potato topping, I have to admit, is crisped to perfection. His eyes are on stilts—he’s Tiny Tim. Oliver Twist. It’s annoyingly sweet. ‘Fucking hell, Mol. My favourite. You didn’t have to do that.’

‘It’s a good Sunday night option,’ I tell him stiffly. ‘I do it a lot so we can use it for leftovers during the week.’

‘Oh, sure,’ he replies, chastened. ‘Makes sense.’

I hate myself a little for being pathetic enough to make what I know is his favourite dish and a little more for being too cowardly to admit to my motives. He’s always adored my cooking, and I’m definitely a feeder.

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