The Third Wife by Lisa Jewell

comprehensive and still had a chip on her shoulder about it.
    ‘I pity the woman who takes him on,’ he said, spooning fresh coffee into the machine.
    ‘I don’t think such a woman exists.’
    There was a commotion at the door and the dogs began to bark and clatter up the wooden stairs.
    ‘I won’t come in,’ they heard Caroline shout down the stairs, ‘but here’s two more for you! Bye! See you tomorrow night!’ The door slammed shut and the dogs stopped barking and Pearl and Beau ran down the stairs, both launching themselves into Adrian’s arms with delight. Adrian made smoothies for all three children and handed them out at the dining table by the garden doors. He passed Cat her cappuccino and added a sugar to his own double espresso and sat at the kitchen counter, surveying the scene. So this was it, he thought. This was what he had missed every Saturday morning for the past four years. This is how it looked, the life he’d left behind. Pearl with cheeks still crimson from her training, Otis still in his pyjamas at 11 a.m., Beau with a large pink circle around his mouth from the smoothie, kicking his legs under the table and smiling to himself. This was it.
    He looked at Cat, adding sugar to her cappuccino, texting someone with the other hand, her enormous breasts barely contained by the skimpy jersey top, her black hair tumbling down around her olive face. And then he looked around the room, this family room he’d designed himself, from what had once been four dank basement rooms. He’d designed it for this, for exactly this, for lazy Saturday mornings, for smoothies and cappuccinos, children and their things in every corner; he’d designed it, built it, filled it with charming clutter and idiosyncratic personalising touches. And then he’d left.
    Beau had still been a baby.
    He felt a lump pass up and down inside his throat.
    If Maya were still alive he would still believe he’d done the right thing. But without her, doubt flowed through every vein in his body.
    He opened his mouth to say the thing that was there, on the tip of his tongue, desperate to be released.
Would you all like it if Daddy moved back in? With Mummy?
And then he looked at his children again and he shut it.

Fourteen
    Luke heard the front door bang shut in his father’s wake and watched from the window as Adrian strode away from the house and towards the high street. He tutted at the state of him. He looked so old, so thin, so scruffy. Honestly, if he stood too long on a street corner someone would eventually throw money at him. Luke pulled his silk dressing gown around his own thin body and headed for the bathroom. It was nice,
so nice
, finally to have some space. This flat was doing his head in. There were no corners, nowhere to hide. His bedroom was a joke. Bunk beds! Bunk beds at twenty-three! And having no separate living space, the kitchen and the living room all squashed into one twelve-foot square. Luke had been happy living at home with his mum because the two of them never had to be in the same space together.
    Luke peered at himself in the bathroom mirror. He examined his facial hair growth. He was growing a beard. It was coming in slightly dark and vaguely curly and he wasn’t sure he liked it. He’d seen a guy the other day who looked a bit like him and he’d had a smooth, dark-blond beard and it had looked really cool. Luke was starting to look more like a tugboat captain than the cool city hipster he’d been hoping for. He sighed and decided to leave it two more days and if it didn’t look any better, he’d shave it off.
    It took him a further hour to shower and iron a shirt and some trousers and dress himself. And then twenty minutes to do his hair. He had tricky hair. It curled in places. Which could be a curse. Or a gift. Depending on how he’d slept on it. And the humidity. Today it was a curse.
    Once he’d got the hair right, he spent a good fifteen minutes staring disconsolately at the contents of his