The Broken by Tamar Cohen

the exposed flesh. Hannah watched transfixed as a bead of blood ballooned out from around the nail before dropping, squat and fat, on to the pale fabric of the chaise longue.

 
    Lucie, aged seven
    Yesterday it was my birthday. Daddy gave me a bike with pink glittery streamers on the handlebars and it has stabilizers but I mustn’t worry about them because soon I’ll be able to ride it and they’ll be off quick as a flash. Mummy didn’t come downstairs and Daddy said she’s tired but I know it’s because of Eloise. Sometimes I hate Eloise, but I can’t say that because it’s bad. I went creeping upstairs to see Mummy even though Daddy said I shouldn’t. She was lying in her bed like a princess with her hair all around the pillow, but when she saw me she told me to go out because she couldn’t bear the sight of me. It’s because I had that bad thought about Eloise. Mummy knows. She knows everything.

7
    ‘I’m going to give her whatever she wants. Anything. I know that scene last night was hideous and she hates my guts at the moment, but she adores September just as much as I do. Once she calms down a bit she’ll want to do what’s best for her.’
    ‘Like having two parents living together? That’d be best, wouldn’t it? Isn’t that what all the studies say?’
    Dan frowned over the top of his strawberry-and-passion-fruit smoothie. ‘Not helpful, Josh man.’
    ‘Sorry.’
    Josh wished he didn’t feel quite so awkward. They were in the café at Dan’s fancy gym in the shadow of Alexandra Palace and, as always, Josh felt he was being judged. It wasn’t that he was in bad shape exactly, but compared with Dan and the other blokes in there he felt flabby and poorly defined. It wasn’t his fault they didn’t have a spare few grand knocking about to spend on gym membership and state-of-the-art Lycra work-out gear. And yes, he supposed he could do as Hannah was always suggesting and go running or cycle to work or whatever, but she had no real clue how much teaching took out of you. People always assumed it was a sedentary, physically undemanding job, but he was always on his feet to illustrate a point, or pacing around the classroom looking at individual students’ work. And there was the psychological stress. It’d take more than a few pull-ups on one of those fancy weights machines they had here, followed by a sauna or a session in the jacuzzi, to sort out the knots in his brain after eight hours of teaching.
    ‘Look,’ Dan put on his sincere face just as obviously as if he were pulling on a hat, ‘I don’t know how many times I can apologize for last night. I know I made you and Hannah a promise, and I broke it. I feel like I abused your hospitality. But, hand on heart, it was the first time me and Sienna had met up. I just had to see her.’
    ‘So it’s serious then?’
    Dan’s face slackened and he cast his eyes downwards like a lovestruck teenager. ‘We have . . . strong feelings for each other.’
    ‘Right. So that was all bullshit then, that stuff about Sasha not having to know about you and Sienna because it was such early days and it could go nowhere?’
    Dan looked as close to shamefaced as he ever got. ‘I just wanted to keep her out of it. I was being protective, I suppose.’
    ‘Protective of who? Your wife or your mistress?’
    Dan glared at him. Clearly the word ‘mistress’ grated. Well, good. Dan was so infuriatingly sure of himself, always bending the truth until it fitted the image he’d created of himself in his own head. He needed to see how this looked from the outside, just how grubby the whole thing was.
    ‘Hey, Dan.’ The woman standing by their table was the colour of a newly minted penny and dressed head to toe in electric-blue Lycra, her highlighted blonde hair pulled up into a high ponytail. ‘You coming to circuit training later?’
    At first Josh took her to be in her late twenties, but closer inspection put her nearer her mid-forties, the fine lines next to