‘I just wish that I could forget it,’ she sighed to Millie one evening over a bottle of wine. ‘All I want is to not think about it any more.’

She should have been more careful what she wished for, Perdita thought wearily a few days later. Her mother caught an infection that proved stubbornly resistant to antibiotics and she grew alarmingly weak. For the next fortnight, Perdita had no time to think about Ed as she dealt with doctors and ferried her mother to and from hospital for tests.

It was soon clear even to Helen that she couldn’t manage on her own while she was unwell, and it was a mark of how ill she felt that Perdita finally persuaded her to accept some help. A carer came in three times a day for half an hour, for which Perdita was enormously grateful, but she still went round first thing in the morning to get her mother out of bed and help her to get dressed. She would try and coax her to eat a little breakfast, and then drive to the office, but it was difficult to concentrate on work and everything seemed to take twice as long as normal.

After work, she went back to check on her mother and spend most of the evening with her before she went home. Perdita felt horribly guilty about not moving in permanently, but she held back from letting out or selling her flat. Some days Helen seemed to be getting better, and Perdita clung to the thought that she could somehow get her old life back eventually.

The tests provided inconclusive and the doctors suggested in the end that her mother was simply at an age when it took longer to bounce back from an infection. Perdita held on to the hope that this was just a temporary situation and made herself concentrate on the signs that Helen was indeed getting stronger. When those were few and far between, though, she would spend the night at her mother’s house, sleeping in her old room, and those were the times she found hardest.

It wasn’t that she didn’t love her mother, but she hated living with her. Their personalities had clashed at the best of times. She was too impatient to be a good nurse, Helen James too old and set in her ways to be a good mother any more. Perdita hated the fact that she was old and ill and resented her for her stubbornness. Too often she would end up snapping at her mother, and then spend the rest of the day feeling guilty.

At least she still had a job, Perdita reminded herself constantly, although she worried, too, that her performance was not as good as it should be. Still, the situation could be so much worse. She ought to feel grateful for what she had.

But as the days turned into a week and one week into two, and she was still staying with her mother, it became harder and harder to feel grateful instead of exhausted and frustrated and dangerously near the end of her tether.

She reached the end of it one cold, wet November evening when she put some of her mother’s clothes into the washing machine and helped her upstairs to bed, only to find when she came down again some time later that there was water all over the floor.

Close to tears of tiredness and strain, Perdita rang a few numbers, but it was almost ten o’clock at night and nobody would come out until the next morning. Which meant another morning off work while she waited for the engineer to arrive. Hearing the desperation in her voice, one of them suggested that she pull out the machine and see if one of the hoses at the back had come off. ‘If that’s the case, you could fix it yourself, love.’

Well, yes, if she had the strength to pull the machine out of its slot. Sloshing around in the great pool of water, Perdita struggled to get a grip of the machine, but it was hopeless and in the end she gave up. She would go and ask if Tom would give her a hand. That wasn’t too much to ask, was it?

But it was Ed who answered the door, not one of the children, as she had hoped, and Perdita was horrified at her body’s instant, instinctive and quite uncontrollable reaction. It was as if every sense, every nerve ending, had forgotten that she was tired and miserable and was jumping up and down and cheering instead. It was a worrying sign when a month of severe talking-tos had simply left her body overjoyed at the mere sight of him again.

‘Perdita!’ he said in surprise.

Still smarting from her rejection, Ed had tried to make things easier for both of them by avoiding her as much as possible, but now he was shocked at her appearance. Once his own instinctive leap of joy had subsided, he saw that she was pale and drawn and so tightly wound that she looked as if she would snap if he touched her with his finger. ‘What is it?’ he asked in concern.

To her horror, Perdita felt tears grab at her throat and for one terrible moment she thought she wasn’t going to be able to speak at all as she forced them desperately down.

‘I was wondering if Tom could come and help me move my mother’s washing machine,’ she managed, but her voice was shamefully cracked and wavering all over the place. ‘I’ve had a bit of a flood.’

‘I’ll come,’ said Ed.

Shouting up the stairs to tell his children where he would be, he walked back with Perdita, who was intensely grateful that he wasn’t going to ask questions. It would take so little for her to burst into stupid tears, and the quiet reassurance of his presence was making her worse, not better. It would have been so much easier to pull herself together if he had rolled his eyes at her uselessness, or been annoying or patronising.

But Ed wasn’t like that. He pulled the washing machine out easily, found the hose that had come off and reattached it without the slightest fuss. Pushing the machine back into place, he turned to find Perdita mopping ineffectually at the water that covered the floor.

‘You look terrible,’ he told her bluntly. ‘Have you had anything to eat?’

‘I was just coming to make something when I found this mess,’ she said wearily. ‘I don’t think I can face anything now.’

‘You need something or you’ll be ill too.’ Ed hesitated. ‘Why don’t you go and have a bath or shower and I’ll have a look in the fridge?’

The thought of a bath was so inviting that Perdita had to close her eyes to resist it. ‘I need to dry this floor first,’ she said.

‘I’ll do that.’ Ed took the mop from her and it was a measure of Perdita’s tiredness that she simply didn’t have the strength to snatch it back. ‘Go on, off you go-but don’t fall asleep in the bath or I’ll have to come up and get you!’

‘I can’t let you do this,’ she said helplessly.

‘Why not?’

‘Well, what about Lauren and Cassie and Tom?’

‘They’ve had something to eat, and they know where I am. They’re all supposed to be doing their homework, but I have no doubt that the minute they heard I was going out they all sloped downstairs and are happily watching some rubbish on television,’ said Ed in a dry voice.

‘Still…’ Perdita hesitated and he glanced at her.

‘Still, what?’

‘You shouldn’t be doing this for me when…well, you know…’

‘When you don’t want to kiss again, and have been avoiding me ever since?’

At last there was some colour in her cheeks. ‘You said you didn’t want to be friends,’ she reminded him.

Ed sighed. ‘I was angry and disappointed, and I didn’t act in the grown-up way I should have done,’ he admitted and then he smiled. ‘Of course we are friends, Perdita,’ he said gently. ‘And what any friend would do now is insist that you go and have a bath. Go on, off you go,’ he said, making shooing motions with his hand, and Perdita succumbed to the wonderful temptation of being told what to do.

When she came down after her bath, the floor was clean and dry, the washing machine whirring to catch up with its interrupted programme, and the kitchen smelled wonderfully of grilling cheese.

‘I’ve made you macaroni cheese,’ Ed told her, seeing her sniff appreciatively. ‘It’s not very glamorous, but I couldn’t find much in the fridge and, anyway, it felt like good comfort food. I’ve also taken the liberty of finding another bottle of your father’s wine. I’m sure he’d agree that you need a glass right now.’

Taking the dish of macaroni out from under the grill, he pulled out a chair from the kitchen table with a flourish. ‘If madam would care to take a seat?’

Perdita sat obediently. There was a horrible constriction in her throat which made it impossible to speak but she managed a smile, albeit a very wobbly affair.

Ed set a plate in front of her and presented the dish with a serving spoon. ‘Help yourself,’ he said.

But Perdita couldn’t. All at once the pressure of tears was too much and she had to press her fingers to her eyes to hold them in, and even that wasn’t enough to stop the humiliating trickle from beneath her lashes.

‘Hey, what have I said?’ Ed put down the dish and allowed himself the luxury of touching her. How could he not rest his hand on her shoulder when her head was bent so that the dark, silky hair swung forward to hide her face and she was so clearly in need of comfort?

‘Nothing. I’m just being pathetic.’ Pride helped Perdita draw a deep breath and lift her head, and she brushed the traces of tears furiously from her cheeks. ‘I’m just not used to anyone looking after me,’ she tried to explain. ‘It’s only because you’re being so nice to me,’ she added almost accusingly.

The grey eyes filled with humour. ‘Would you rather I was horrible to you?’

‘At least I wouldn’t snivel,’ said Perdita with a return to her old form, and Ed smiled as he pulled out a chair and sat down at the end of the table.

‘You’re tired and overwrought,’ he pointed out. ‘A few tears is the least you’re allowed. Now eat up your macaroni before it gets cold!’ he pretended to scold her.

Perdita picked up her fork. ‘This looks delicious.’

‘I’m afraid the sauce is a bit lumpy,’ Ed apologised with a grimace. ‘I can never get it to go smooth. The kids are always moaning about my sauces.’

The sauce was, indeed, lumpy but to Perdita, tired and hungry and desperately in need of some warm, comforting stodge, it was one of the best things she had ever eaten.

‘It’s fantastic,’ she said in between mouthfuls.

‘I feel sure you’re just being kind,’ said Ed, but she could tell that he was pleased. ‘You should hear Cassie and Lauren when I make it for them. They get down on their knees and beg me to go on a cooking course where I can learn to make a sauce properly, the minxes!’ he finished with a grin.

‘You don’t need to go on a course,’ said Perdita. ‘I can teach you how to make a sauce. I’ll teach you all, in fact. There’s no reason why your kids shouldn’t learn, too-there’s no mystery to it!’

Ed brightened. ‘Would you really do that?’

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘It’s what any friend would do,’ she quoted his own words back at him.

There was a tiny pause. ‘So is friends really all we can be, Perdita?’ Ed asked after a moment.

Perdita didn’t answer directly. She put down her fork and reached for her wine. ‘Did I ever tell you about Nick?’ she asked, her eyes on the glass she was turning slowly between her fingers.

Has she told you about Nick yet? Ed remembered Millie’s words at Perdita’s lunch party.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Is Nick an ex-boyfriend?’

‘He was more than a boyfriend,’ said Perdita quietly. ‘Nick was the centre of my world for two years. I loved him the way I’ve never loved anyone else. I would have done anything for him.’

Ed wasn’t sure that he wanted to hear all this, but he had asked, he supposed. ‘I thought you didn’t believe in compromise?’ he said, remembering what she had told him when they’d first met. ‘You must have compromised somewhere along the line if you lasted two years.’

‘I did,’ she said, her expression sad. ‘I compromised everything I believed about myself. I thought I was strong and independent and confident, and it was a shock to realise when I met Nick that I was ready to chuck all of that out of the window as long as I could be with him.’

Ed frowned. ‘Didn’t he love you?’

‘He said that he did,’ said Perdita, wondering how to explain Nick to a man like Ed, ‘but he was always afraid of committing himself to me.’

‘What, even after two years together?’

She bit her lip. It still wasn’t easy to think about how blindly she had believed in Nick, how determinedly she had closed her eyes to what she didn’t want to see. It hadn’t all been Nick’s fault.

‘Nick hadn’t been separated from his wife that long when I met him,’ she tried to explain. ‘He still felt guilty about splitting up the family, and he was very concerned about his two children, although they actually adapted to the new situation better than either of their parents.’

‘Were you the reason Nick and his wife separated?’ Ed made himself ask, and was relieved when Perdita shook her head.