I Give It A Year

by Helen Whitaker

Genres: Family Life; Contemporary Romance

Synopsis

Her husband's moved out - and her dad's moved in...
Curl up with the page-turning story full of emotion about family, marriage and second chances

It's New Year's Eve, and Iris has just found out that her husband, Adam, is cheating on her. Furious, she kicks him out, and enlists her Dad to move in and help with the children whilst she tries to mend her broken heart.

But her Dad soon starts to display signs of Alzheimer's, and Iris realises that if she loses her partner, she'll be managing an awful lot on her own. Soon, she realises that Adam wasn't the only one taking their marriage for granted, and for the sake of the children she decides to give him one more chance.

But is it braver to stay than to run? And can anyone fall in love with the same person twice?

See what your favourite authors are saying about I Give It A Year:
'Emotionally smart and thought provoking' Clare Pooley, author of THE AUTHENTICITY PROJECT
'So well-observed, with a kind eye and an open heart. It's wonderful.' Laura Jane Williams, author of THE LOVE SQUARE
'A keenly observed tale of love gone wrong and the things we do to try and make it right again. Whitaker deftly mines the complexity of long-term relationships, exposing both their fragility but ultimately leaving the reader with a real sense of hope. A triumph!' Mike Gayle, author of ALL THE LONELY PEOPLE
'Wise and warm and full of 'aha!' Moments' Helen Russell, author of THE YEAR OF LIVING DANISHLY

Release date: December 20, 2020

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 384

Sample

Ten …

The telly blares with the sound of pissed-up revellers as the camera pans down the Thames. Fifteen years ago, I would have been there with them, having spent all evening jostling for a spot and dying for a wee so I was in a good position for the countdown.

Nine …

I’m so glad I’m not on a packed riverbank, drinking Prosecco that’s only cold because the temperature is Baltic and pretending to have a good time while worrying about how busy the tube station will be post-midnight.

Eight …

At least Jack and Sav are asleep. Finally. The best thing about having young kids is that you can use them as a convenient excuse to get out of things you don’t want to do. ‘Sorry, no babysitter!’ is the best get out of jail card of all time.

Seven …

Even if most of the time it’s a total ball-ache having no babysitter, because it means you can’t do things you genuinely want to do either.

Six …

But New Year’s Eve definitely doesn’t fall into that category. I’m not even bothered about sitting here alone, watching the countdown on TV, while Adam is up in Sheffield.

Five …

It’s not as though he’s up there having a good time. Having to get on a rammed train from London on New Year’s Eve to give your thirty-seven-year-old brother a talking to because he’s possibly-maybe-almost-certainly been barred from another pub in the city centre, and they want some money for damages otherwise they’re pressing charges. Cheers, Gabe. Happy sodding New Year.

Four …

That’s a point. I bet Adam had to pay the landlord. Not that he’d have mentioned it to me. He always gets funny with me if I bring up lending Gabe money.

Three …

‘Lending.’

Two …

The last time he did it he didn’t even tell me, and I went overdrawn on the joint account paying the deposit for Center Parcs.

One …

Thousands of people scream ‘HAPPY NEW YEAR’ and hug each other as Big Ben bongs in the background. Fireworks erupt, filling the screen with colour and smoke, and the BBC presenter out on location tries to finish her link above the din.

‘The British public was assured that the great clock’s bongs would be temporarily restored during important national events, such as New Year and Remembrance Sunday, until restoration work is completed.’

I drain the dregs of my white wine. The rest of the bottle is in the fridge and for a second I contemplate getting a refill, before yawning and remembering that, despite it taking until 10 p.m. to wrestle the kids into bed, they will almost certainly be up pre-6 a.m., as is the unwritten law when you’ve been left to parent solo and have imbibed more than two units of alcohol.

Instead, I flick off the telly and fire a message to Adam.

Hope it’s not a nightmare up there. Happy New Year. X

He’s probably already asleep at his mum’s house, back in the single bed in the room he used to share with Gabe.

The patch of floor in front of me simultaneously lights up and chirrups. Bloody kids! Adam’s iPad lies abandoned, screen up, on the carpet, half concealed by Christmas toys that they’ve already got bored of. My text appears in the corner, obscuring part of the photo on his home screen, a selfie where we’re all smushed together in front of the London Eye. You can barely see the wheel because it’s all grinning faces, or in Jack’s case, him anarchically shouting ‘poo’ when Adam said, ‘Everyone say cheese.’ I pick up the tablet and put it on the table while I look for its case, clearing a few other stray toys from the area. The house looks like a bomb-site, with discarded superheroes, cardboard boxes and foot-shattering bits of Lego all over the carpet. The kids have insisted on keeping every single bit of tat from every Christmas cracker, so there’s endless plastic crap spilling out from the toy drawers we’re now resigned to having in our once relatively stylish living room.

I pick up the debris – Sylvanian, Sylvanian, Spider-Man wearing a Sylvanian’s outfit (Jack will be livid) – and find the case underneath the Millennium Falcon. It’s plastered with fairy stickers, which makes me grin. Sav’s handiwork. Adam will look very cool reading the Guardian on his iPad on the tube when he goes back to work on Thursday. The screen lights up again as I pick it up. Another message. That it’s simply from ‘J’ makes me look more closely. I can only see the preview.

Thanks for partying with me like it’s 1995 again …

Who’s J? And what party? He’s with his brother, sorting out yet another catastrophe of Gabe’s own creation. That’s what he said anyway. Maybe he went out for a drink after clearing up Gabe’s mess and bumped into someone he knew. I can’t begrudge him that. What’s a night off from the kids if you can’t have a spontaneous night out at the pub?

But that doesn’t tell me who J is.

Heart fluttering, there’s a second when I don’t want to know, but my suspicions quickly take over and I swipe the screen open, tapping the passcode – Jack and Sav’s birthdays – onto the landing page. My stomach plunges as the full message appears, along with the rest of a thread that goes back way further than tonight.

Thanks for partying with me like it’s 1995 again. Shame I have a flight or we could have got drunk and seen in the New Year together properly – although sparkling water and a king-size at the Hotel du Vin is a bit more glam than cider and sneaking into my old bedroom back at my parents’. x

1995. A flight. An old bedroom.

In 1995, Adam was a sixth-former in Sheffield. And he was going out with a girl called Jules. Amazing Jules, who broke his heart when she went off to a different uni, and whose brilliant career as a pilot was mentioned on one of our early dates and has provided fodder for my lower self-esteem moments ever since.

Adam’s reply is almost instant.

Safe trip. Text me when you get back x

He hasn’t replied to my message.

The tablet trembles in my hand so I grip it a bit tighter. I can hear whooping and music outside, through the walls of our North London terraced house and drifting along the street, but even through the bangs and whistles the sound of my own breath catching is louder. It feels like my body is pulsating but my mind is clear, focused. Because I instantly know it’s not going to turn out to be a misunderstanding. He’s never even mentioned seeing Jules, so how can it be? I swipe my shaky finger down the page to reach the start of their conversation. It scrolls and scrolls and scrolls, new messages loading up every time I think I’ve got to the top, my eyes blurring with tears as they settle on the odd word or phrase as messages whizz past.

In meBeautifulFucking sexyCan’t wait

It looks like sometimes they’ve exchanged several messages a day, and sometimes days have gone by with no contact. Eventually, the window bounces, going back no further. Five months ago: 5 August, 11.07 a.m. A blue bubble showing that Adam sent the first message.

Hi, this is my number these days.

Seven words that blow apart my night. My year. My life.

I’ve been sitting in silence for hours when I hear his key turn in the lock. When the kids are running riot I usually yearn for quiet, an hour to myself, but today – when I’ve packed them off so I could wait alone for Adam to come home – the silence makes me feel as though I can’t breathe. The door slams and I jump, as if I haven’t been poised for his entrance all afternoon. What I mean to do is thrust the tablet into his hands the second he walks through the door, while saying something damning that an imagined crowd of similarly wronged women (on Oprah? OK, more like Loose Women) would greet with thunderous applause.

Instead I rush into the hallway and stop dead at the sight of him. He looks normal. Like, completely normal. His dark hair is streaked with the same few strands of grey; his chin is dotted with the same patchy stubble I used to tease him about. He doesn’t look like a man who’s been shagging a hot pilot.

‘You wouldn’t believe the state of the train back,’ he’s moaning, as if I could give two shits. ‘A signal delay on top of the typical New Year’s Day chaos meant we were diverted to Doncaster and all the ticket reservations were cancelled. There were people crammed in every spare centimetre of aisle.’

He leans in to give me a perfunctory kiss, not noticing – or at least not mentioning – that my face looks like a crumpled-up paper bag from the combination of crying and swigging the vodka I found at the back of the freezer. As he does, I flinch, and my voice cracks as I choke out, ‘I found your texts. Are we over then?’

In a split second his whole face changes. He looks exactly like Jack when he’s been caught doing something he shouldn’t, knows there’s no denying it, but is going to lie anyway. I’d laugh, except I spent until 7 a.m. sobbing and reading his sexy back-and-forth with Jules, before trying to hold it together in front of the kids this morning on no sleep and no answers.

‘What texts?’ he says, his hand frozen where he’s only half unzipped his coat. ‘What are you talking about, Iris?’

The fright on his face ignites a deep guttural anger that sonic booms around my body from somewhere inside my chest.

The fucking coward.

‘You’re lying,’ I say. ‘Don’t you dare lie to me on top of what you’ve done.’

I wish his train had crashed on the way back from Sheffield and he’d died. Actually, I don’t. But only because then I’d have to listen to people telling me what a great husband and father he was, and what I want everyone right now to know is what a burning trash-fire scumbag he really is.

He’s still staring at me, saying nothing, just looking scared. Big grey eyes questioning what I’ll do next. ‘Are you going to say anything?’ I ask, in a way that leaves no room for ambiguity. He needs to speak. Yes? No? I’ve made a terrible mistake, Iris, I lost my phone weeks ago and it’s someone else sending sub-Tinder-level sexts to my high-school girlfriend.

He’s not looking at me; he’s still fumbling with the zip of his coat. He opens his mouth to speak but all he says is: ‘Where are the kids?’

‘Fran’s,’ I spit back. Somewhere beneath the pulsating rage and the full-body fear, there’s a pang of guilt – for the kids and for poor Fran, who texted me at 5.30 a.m. when she was woken up for the day by her twins with the sort of mum-moan about having a shit night’s sleep that deserves a reply full of solidarity for her suffering. Instead she got a hysterical phone call from her best friend that resulted in having two more children dumped on top of her own three on New Year’s Day.

The blood is pumping around my body, crashing through my temples. Self-loathing is churning in my stomach, a hangover-esque paranoia pressing at the back of my eyes. But it’s not paranoia because it happened. My anger shrivels back into hurt as quickly as it appeared. Darts of dread fire through my brain. Is he leaving us? Is that why he isn’t saying anything?

Adam looks around the hallway like a spooked animal looking for an escape route. We painted it four years ago, in a knock-off shade of the mousy Farrow & Ball one that David Cameron painted that stupid writing shed. It’s all shabby now, having been scraped by the kids’ scooters and grocery bags every time we’ve carried anything through it to the kitchen, all the mundane stuff you do when you’ve been married forever and haven’t got enough time to be careful. The grubbiness of normal life, not sex-in-a-fancy-hotel life.

‘Why did you do it?’ My voice is so wobbly the whole sentence vibrates.

He finally turns to face me.

I can’t tell if he’s crying or I’m seeing him through my own tears, but his face is crumpled, blurred. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says after what feels like a thousand years, his voice shaking. I leave the pause to stretch out while I wait for the rest. Either a barrage of apologies and excuses, or the alternative. Him saying he’s sorry because it’s over. It doesn’t come quick enough and in the end, I can’t help but fill the gap.

‘Sorry about what? Which bit? Shagging someone behind my back, or getting caught? Destroying our marriage or the fact that you’re only now telling me it’s over?’ My voice is anguished. ‘Say something, Adam. Tell me. Isn’t it enough to do this to me without leaving some sort of X Factor-style pause to build up the suspense?’

‘Can we go into the lounge?’ His rucksack is still on his shoulder. I don’t want it in the house. A bag of laundry from his sordid affair. That he’ll drop into the basket along with all the other clothes, expecting someone – me – to wash it.

‘If you’re going to leave me, I don’t want it to be in the living room.’ This suddenly feels very important and I don’t know why. Maybe because last June after Mum told me about her cancer, Adam held me there while I cried. In my head it still seems like a place of sanctuary.

‘I’m not going to leave you,’ he says quietly. He finally drops his bag and rubs his left shoulder. It’s been giving him gyp for weeks. The aches and pains of being over forty, I joked with him the other day. I offered to make him an appointment at the osteopath. For his sex injuries, I think now. He rubs his hand over his stubble. Takes a big breath. He’s stalling. ‘I don’t know what this … thing is. Was.’

‘Was?’ I spit it out. ‘As of midnight, it looked pretty ongoing to me. Did you dump her while you were on a stationary train in Doncaster?’

‘No.’ His eyes drop and he fiddles with his coat zip again before giving up on it. I can see his hands shaking. Good. ‘But I will end it. It’s not what you think.’

‘Do tell me what I think, Adam. No, do.’

‘It’s been a difficult few months,’ he says, stepping closer towards me. I instinctively step back. ‘Don’t you feel that?’

It has. Mum’s illness came without warning, the full horror coinciding with Sav starting school in September, which she’s decided she hates. Earlier in the summer, Adam’s work decided to make them all reapply for their jobs – without necessarily being guaranteed one at the end of the process. ‘Difficult’ is an understatement; I’d say it’s been hideous. But I didn’t start fucking someone else as an escape. I started running.

‘Are you telling me you had an affair because you’ve been stressed? With that logic I should have been shagging both the Hemsworth brothers by now.’

‘Who are the Hemsworth brothers?’

I forgot that Adam’s too worthy to know anything about pop culture. He didn’t have a TV when we first met. I should have dumped him then. ‘It’s irrelevant,’ I snap. ‘Don’t change the subject.’

His eyes flare with a spark of annoyance. ‘Well, what do you want me to say? Nothing I say now will be right.’ He sighs. Rubs his chin again, as though the whole conversation is making him weary. ‘I didn’t mean for it to happen—’

‘Which time?’ I interrupt. I’m not having him getting defensive, not when he’s the one in the wrong. ‘Or at all?’ I can’t get my words out fast enough. It’s as though I’m trying to speak while running; I’m not taking in enough breath between words.

He at least has the respect to look ashamed. ‘No. Yes. Neither. We ran into each other. A while back. And we stayed in touch. It wasn’t …’ His eyes flick over me, and I want to cry at the casual judgement. All I can think about are the pictures I saw of Jules last night while deep-diving into her Instagram feed and how I nowhere near measure up, particularly not right now. She’s all jet-setting around the world for beach sunset set-ups and cocktails in Miami. Shiny, almost black hair, with tanned skin and liquid brown eyes. She’s a cross between the actress who plays Wonder Woman and a Kardashian sister, except without the identikit pillow face. Photo after photo of her looking curvy and strong while sipping green juices, hiking up Runyon Canyon in LA or wearing her hair braided in front of waterfalls. It’s like she has one of those Insta-husbands following her around to take eight thousand versions of the same almost perfect shot until they get the right one, except if she had a husband, she wouldn’t be shagging mine, would she? Maybe she would. After all, she’s sodding Wonder Woman.

‘It wasn’t a thing,’ he finishes. ‘Not to start off with.’

‘No, not until the twenty-sixth of August, to be exact.’ Adam looks at me as though I’m being facetious, but I’m not. The date is seared into my brain, along with the text.

Wow. I wasn’t expecting that. We should talk. I feel like I’m 17 again.

And her reply:

Go back to your wife. We’ll speak soon. X

He did. Go back to his wife, that is. But he went back to her too. Again and again.

‘Iris.’ He reaches a hand towards me.

‘Don’t.’ I flinch and angle myself away. ‘I’ve read the messages. I know what you said to each other.’ I also know the one thing neither of them has ever said. It’s my only port in this storm of emotion. They have never said they love each other. Not over iMessage anyway.

I don’t want to know the answer but I ask him anyway. ‘Do you love her?’

Adam’s eyes fly open in shock. ‘What?’

‘Please don’t make me say it again.’ Tears are falling down my face and I swipe at them with the raggedy cardigan-shawl thing I only ever wear around the house. ‘Is she The One? The one that got away and you never got over? I knew she broke your heart but that was …’ I work out the years in my head; Adam’s forty-three in June. ‘Twenty-five years ago. If you’ve been waiting for your moment to win her back, like some sort of pathetic Friends Reunited story, then now’s the time to say.’

‘No, she’s not … The One or whatever,’ he mumbles, reaching out for me again. This time I slap his hand away.

‘Get. Off. Me.’

He cradles his hand in the other, a wounded look on his face as though it genuinely hurt him.

‘She was someone, you know she was, I told you about her. I don’t think I would have ever left Sheffield if it wasn’t for her.’ If Adam’s trying to get sympathy for his hard-luck-northerner-done-good story, he’s picked the wrong time. Raised by a single parent, absent father, blah blah blah.

‘Yet you’re willing to throw away our family for her. And what, let your kids be raised by a single mother, while you fuck off to travel the world with her.’

My missile wounds him just as it was supposed to and colour rises to his cheeks. I can see by the way his face hardens that he’s angry. ‘I would never abandon the kids and you know it.’

‘Do I?’ My voice is icy. I’m finally getting a foothold in this conversation and talking like someone in a TV show who knows exactly the right thing to say and how to hit his weak spots. Good. Yet each bit of malice I throw at him makes me feel worse. I don’t want to be a character in a script with the person I love. Loved. Whatever. ‘I’m not sure I know you at all. I certainly don’t know what you want. So what is it? Do you want to stay married or have I done you a favour by finding out?’

His voice stumbles. ‘Iris, please. I’m sorry, my head’s been all over the place. You and I—’

‘YOU’RE STILL NOT ANSWERING THE QUESTION,’ I scream at him, and he recoils as though I’m about to hit him. As though I’m the one who’s problematic. Something snaps inside me; my patience, my heart, who can tell. ‘I want you to get out,’ I decide. I hate this conversation. I hate how powerless I am to influence its outcome. I hate that he’s not begging me for forgiveness.

‘What?’

Now I’ve said it out loud I don’t know how I could stand to have him here to start off with. ‘You need to leave. I’ll tell the kids you had to stay at your mum’s a bit longer.’ My mind starts whirring with the logistics. ‘They don’t need to know you’ve come back yet.’

‘Where am I supposed to go?’

‘I hear there’s another lovely Hotel du Vin in Wimbledon,’ I snarl, picking his bag up off the floor and throwing it at him. It’s not heavy but he reacts by dramatically stepping back. Two days ago, I would have taken the piss out of him for that, and we’d have laughed about it. Now I think he’s pathetic. ‘It’s not my problem where you go. I just know that I can’t stand to have you here right now.’

‘But we haven’t sorted out …’ He stops. ‘This,’ he finishes lamely.

‘No, we haven’t,’ I say. ‘Because I’ve been waiting for you to decide if you love me, if you love us, if you want to stay. And I’m no nearer to an answer. But I’ve realised that it’s not just up to you, it’s up to me too, and all I know is that I can’t think with you here.’

I squeeze past him, adding another scrape to the hallway wall with my belt as I keep as far from physical contact with him as possible. Another marker of family life. Perhaps the final one. But I can’t think about that right now so I open the front door instead, a blast of freezing January wind rushing in from a day that has got dark having barely got light to start with. And then I fix my expression into one more solid than I feel. ‘Go, Adam. Get out.’

He takes a tentative step towards where I’m standing on the threshold. ‘But what about Jack and Sav? They’re back to school tomorrow and I’m supposed to be dropping them off. I want to see them.’

He’s right. During the week, I have to leave for work a full hour before him. Our entire family routine relies on Adam doing the school run in the mornings.

‘I’ll come by and get them in the morning,’ he adds. ‘They’ll worry if I’m not here and you won’t make it to work on time otherwise.’

‘They won’t worry, because they’re going to think you’re still at your mum’s. It’ll be weirder if you turn up for the school run. And I don’t need you to. We’ll manage.’ I have no idea how we’ll manage. My heart twists again. ‘I’ll ring you in a few days and we can talk. In the meantime, you can think about what you want.’ I start to usher him towards the door, but he holds his hand up, desperate.

‘I don’t want to leave. I want our family. I want us. We need to talk about it.’

The right words, but at the wrong time. Why didn’t he say any of this earlier, when he could see I wanted it all to be a big mistake?

‘I can’t talk to you now. I can barely stand to look at you.’

‘Please, Iris.’ His eyes are frantic, searching my face for a different response.

Am I really about to chuck him out? What if he goes straight back to Jules?

Then you’ve answered your own question.

I look out into the street. The lamp-posts have all come on and it’s deserted. Everyone keeping out of the cold and nursing their hangovers with a takeaway and a film. How I wish that was us. ‘You need to go,’ I say flatly. ‘You don’t get to say when the time is to talk about it.’

He closes the rest of the gap between us, passing me and going through the door, but then he stands in front of me on the doorstep, his tall body tensed and still.

‘You can’t make me leave.’

I shiver and summon up all my strength. ‘No, I can’t. But hardly anything you’ve said since you got home makes me think you care about saving us, so if you won’t do the one thing I’m asking for then I know it’s over. Give me some time to think and to keep things normal for the kids.’

He pauses, stares at me for a second longer, before nodding solemnly in assent. ‘I’ll phone them later and pretend I’m at Mum’s.’

It’s this small act of complicity that threatens to overwhelm me. To protect them, I have to protect him.

I shut the door before I can see which direction he goes in and then sit down on the stairs, looking at the door, half expecting him to come back. I pull my phone out of my pocket. My husband is gone. Who can I say that to? I’m ashamed and embarrassed. Fran already knows the bare bones, but I can’t ring her when she’s with the children. I’ll fill her in when she drops them off in a couple of hours. Until then I need to sort out the practicalities, like how they’re getting to school tomorrow. More than anything, I wish Mum was here. For many, many reasons. Am I going to have to pull a sickie on the first day back of the year, when I’m going to be expected to be refreshed and on it? I swipe my phone open, and sniff as hard as I can while wiping my face on my cardie. I think of Jules in her body-con sportswear, hiking. Under my baggy cardie, I’m wearing a slogan T-shirt that says ‘Give Peas a Chance’ that Jack (Adam) bought for my birthday two years ago, and boyfriend jeans that look cool when people like Rosie Huntington-Whiteley wear them with heels and slouchy tops, but on my pear shape make me look like a middle-aged refugee from an Avril Lavigne gig.

Don’t think about Jules.

Another sniff and I think about the one person I can depend on, stabbing at the contact. The phone quickly connects.

‘Happy New Year, Iris.’

‘Happy New Year,’ I reply, my voice thick from suppressed tears. I force myself to sound perky. ‘Adam’s been called up to a family crisis in Sheffield, but the kids go back to school tomorrow. Dad, I don’t suppose you’d be able to help me out for a couple of days, would you?’

‘I want a Curly Wurly!’

‘No, Jack. I said NO,’ I snap as I slam closed the kitchen cupboard, narrowly avoiding his fingers and wincing at my own carelessness. ‘Toast or cereal.’

‘I hate toast with seeds in it,’ he mutters, just as I remember we don’t have any bread anyway.

‘Fine. Cereal it is.’ I shove a box of Cheerios in his direction. He deliberately doesn’t catch it and the box tips, Cheerios skittering all over the counter. He starts laughing.

‘JACK!’

‘You’re the one who pushed it over.’

It could be a typical weekday morning, with me endlessly losing it, when Sav comes into the room, climbs onto a seat at the kitchen table and says, ‘Where’s Daddy?’

My heart squeezes. She’s sitting there all sleepy in her favourite unicorn pyjamas, completely unaware of the way our lives have collapsed.

‘I told you, sweets, he’s at a work thingy. He’s got to meet some important people about raising some money for his charity.’

The doorbell goes, saving me from any further explanation, and I run into the hallway to answer it.

Even though he was here on Christmas Day – eight days that now feel like eight years ago – Dad’s slightly wrinkled shirt and could-do-with-a-wash chinos (Dad is of the generation that thinks you should look smart even when at home) seem bigger, baggier. Registering this spears guilt through my anguish. I haven’t seen him enough. Does he even know how to work the washing machine? The iron? Mum didn’t like him meddling with ‘her’ appliances, which took care of both the laundry and any responsibility he might have felt about being a ‘new man’, as he occasionally called it.

He waits on the doorstep for me to let him in, clutching the little wheelie suitcase (cabin baggage-approved size) Mum got in the sale at Debenhams a few years ago. Mum would have used her key, then started tidying up as she made her way from the hall to the kitchen.

‘Come in,’ I say, swallowing him in a massive hug as he steps into the hall. He looks inordinately pleased to be here. The hug takes me as much by surprise as him. He’s never been a big man, but now my 5’6 seems to completely dwarf him. He hugs me back, almost sagging against my weight, and we stand there for a minute holding on to each other. Did I even hug h. . .