Alex looked at the beautiful mess of them, and he understood it at last.

Building a family had never been about securing an heir, or carrying on a name, or demanding perfection, or winning anything.

It had been, the entire time, about one thing only, the one thing he had failed to do when it mattered most and had finally, at great cost, learned how to do.

It was about choosing to stay, when the house stopped looking easy.

That was the whole of it, the lesson that had cost Alex six years of his children’s lives to learn, and it is worth stating plainly, because it is the thing he had gotten most catastrophically wrong.