they’dWhenever Vanessa thought of Stephen, she couldn’t help but think of him as an accident. She would never have changed a thing about him, or a second of her time spent in the company of her son. But that didn’t make it any less true.
He’d been conceived on holiday; amid a rare week away in the Algarve, during which Herbert had done nothing except complain about the heat and all the “bloody foreigners”. Perhaps it had been the warmth that had stimulated him that night – on the eve of their flight home, when he had taken her to bed, eager and fervent for the first time in weeks. Years into their marriage, she’d already become accustomed to treating each night as if she were sharing her bed with a stranger; a stranger who crumpled her sheets once a month at most, until s*x became a spora
