Richard made pancakes the way his children liked them — too many chocolate chips for Chloe, not enough for Drew, and one plain one set aside for himself that he'd inevitably end up giving away. Saturday sunlight spilled across the kitchen while the three of them gathered around the table, forks tapping the plates, warm and familiar.
"So," Richard said, flipping another pancake onto a growing stack, "what shall we do today?"
"Cinema?" Drew suggested through a mouthful.
"It's sunny," Chloe countered. "We should do something outside. We could go to the park."
"We always go to the park."
"Well, you always want the cinema."
They squabbled lightly, the way siblings do when there is nothing really at stake, and Richard listened with a quiet smile. It had been a long time since Saturday mornings felt like this — easy, unguarded, theirs.
"What about the zoo?" he said suddenly.
Both kids froze mid-bite.
"The zoo?" Chloe repeated, as if he'd offered a trip to the moon.
"You've only ever been with school trips," Richard reminded them. "It's about time we went properly. As a family."
He wasn't sure why the idea hit him the way it did. Maybe it was the sunlight. Maybe it was the simple rightness of the moment. Or maybe it was the dawning realisation, growing steadily in him, that he wanted more of this — more moments where he wasn't just a provider or a peacekeeper, but a father who showed up.
Chloe's face lit up first. "Can we see the elephants?"
"And the big cats?" Drew added, trying to be casual, but failing.
Richard grinned. "We can see everything."
By midday they were wandering the winding paths of the zoo, the air thick with the sound of children squealing at exhibits and the distant calls of animals. Chloe pointed out every enclosure as if she were the guide. Drew made terrible jokes about the penguins' fashion sense. Richard trailed them both, hands in pockets, feeling something inside him loosen — like he'd been holding himself too tightly for too many years.
And somewhere between the giraffes and the reptile house, memories began to rise. Soft at first. Then sharper.
Walking beneath the shaded archway toward the primate enclosure, he found his mind drifting — unbidden — back to the early days of his marriage. The days he rarely allowed himself to visit.
He took a slow breath, the sounds of the zoo fading as memories of the past slipped quietly into his mind.
The next few years moved quickly — the kind of quick that only happens when ambition and exhaustion lace together so tightly you forget where one ends and the other begins.
Richard built his company from a cramped shared office with peeling paint and a printer that jammed if you looked at it too sternly. He hired two people, then five, then twelve. He learned to negotiate, to delegate, to survive on four hours of sleep and cheap takeaways. And through all of it, he kept looking toward Eleanor as if she were the reward waiting at the end of every long day.
She was proud of him then — genuinely. She liked introducing him as the founder, she liked the dinners where people asked him about projections and growth and potential. She glowed in those moments; and Richard, not noticing the subtle calculations behind each smile, glowed with her.
It was during that period that he met Robert.
Robert Blake arrived at one of Richard's early investor meetings — tall, calm, dressed neatly, but without fuss. Where most investors loomed or postured, Robert listened. When he finally spoke, it was with quiet intelligence and a reassuring steadiness Richard hadn't realised he needed.
After the meeting, Robert had clapped him on the shoulder.
"You've got something here," he said. "Rough edges, but something worth building."
That was the start.
Coffee meetings became lunches. Lunches became after-work pints. They talked about work, yes, but also about life. About being men who were trying — sometimes too hard — to make a future they could be proud of.
Within a year, Richard realised he trusted Robert more than anyone outside his own family.
He had no idea then how much that friendship would come to matter to him.
Richard's company grew, Robert's responsibilities increased; and on Friday nights the two couples often ended up together. Dinner at a new opening in the city. Drinks at a quiet bar.
Lisa was warm, funny, gentle. She always laughed at Richard's dry humour, and Richard always admired her way of grounding Robert.
Eleanor, meanwhile, behaved differently around Robert.
Not enough that a stranger would notice.
But enough that Richard did — yet dismissed.
At first it was small things: watching Robert's every move, a bright smile aimed a little too directly, the subtle tilt of her body when she spoke to him. Once, when Richard returned to the table after taking a call, he found Eleanor laughing at something Robert had said — her hand brushing his arm.
Robert shifted almost instantly, polite, but firm; easing out of her touch.
Later, Robert pulled Richard aside, his voice low.
"I should tell you," he said carefully, "your wife is very… forward. I just want to avoid any misunderstanding."
Richard had laughed it off.
"Oh, that's just Eleanor. She's just playful, you can't take it as anything but friendliness."
Robert had raised an eyebrow.
Looking back, Richard would replay that conversation more often than he liked to admit — the first time someone had tried to nudge him toward the truth.
He hadn't listened.
He had been in love and love had made him generous.
Blindly generous.
Still, the dinners continued.
Sometimes the evenings unfolded effortlessly — Richard and Robert slipping into comfortable conversation about work, Lisa gently trying to draw Eleanor into topics that reached beyond fashion and wine, yet Eleanor would respond with bright anecdotes about parties, her smile always just a touch inscrutable.
Other nights, though, a tension threaded quietly through the room. Eleanor would steer the conversation toward marriage, toward compatibility, toward "keeping things exciting," her questions sharpened by a curiosity that felt anything but casual. She leaned in towards Robert a little too closely.
Robert always redirected and shifted away from her subtly.
Lisa sensed it too.
Then came the foreign correspondent role — the promotion that sent Robert abroad, moving between conflict zones with a camera and a notebook. Richard tried to be supportive, but there had been something haunted in Robert's eyes even then.
And two years into marriage, Eleanor became pregnant.
She told him casually, almost as an afterthought.
Richard had stared, stunned, the joy rising too fast to contain.
"A baby," he breathed.
Eleanor blinked, as if surprised by his excitement. "Yes. I suppose we should start preparing."
He hadn't minded her coolness. He was too thrilled.
In the weeks that followed, her pregnancy reshaped the entire household — or rather, Richard reshaped himself around it. Eleanor took to her bed almost immediately, declaring that the exhaustion was "unlike anything any doctor could possibly describe," and that the slightest movement made her dizzy. She drifted through the flat in silk nightgowns, hair pinned loosely, one hand pressed to her forehead as though she were performing a delicate tragedy.
Her complaints became part of the atmosphere.
"Richard, my back… it's unbearable," she'd sigh from the bedroom doorway, though she'd barely risen before lying back down again.
He would appear instantly, abandoning any task without hesitation.
"Tell me what you need, sweetheart," he'd say — and mean it.
Some days she wanted warm milk. Others, strawberries from a shop halfway across the city because she'd suddenly decided they were the only thing her stomach could tolerate. She'd send him searching for pillows of just the right firmness, or ask him to sit beside the bed for hours, talking softly because the quiet felt "too heavy."
He ran baths. He fetched tea. He adjusted curtains and blankets and room temperature with the single-minded devotion of a man who believed love was expressed through willingness — willingness to help, to accommodate, to absorb her discomfort as if he could somehow lessen it by trying hard enough.
He hated that she had to bear so much. It twisted something in him to see her unhappy, unsettled, feeling unlike herself. So nothing she demanded felt excessive; nothing felt unreasonable. He wanted to care for her. He wanted to make her comfortable. He wanted to be the kind of husband who made the world easier for her, even if he couldn't take on the deeper cause of her complaints.
Every evening, he would come home and check on her before anything else.
"How are you feeling today, sweetheart?" he'd ask quietly, sitting at the edge of the bed.
"Oh, dreadful," she'd murmur, often without looking at him. "Just dreadful."
And he would stay with her, rubbing her feet, stroking her hair, listening as she catalogued every ache and inconvenience. To him, this was love — tending, soothing, proving himself useful. Showing her she wasn't alone.
He never wondered why she rarely asked how he was doing. He never questioned that her world required constant reinforcement while his own needed to be small, quiet, contained.
That was the shape of things then.
And he accepted it, believing that devotion was a simple equation: she struggled — and he steadied her.
It was only years later that he realised how early the pattern had been set.
By the time they stepped back through the front door, late afternoon light stretched long and golden across the hallway. Everyone moved a little slower — pleasantly tired, pleasantly full, pleasantly content.
Chloe kicked off her shoes with a groan. "My feet hurt. But in a good way."
Drew dropped onto the sofa and announced, "I'm never walking again," before immediately sitting up to check whether he'd gotten any good photos of the lions. He had. He narrated each one to Chloe whether she wanted to hear it or not.
Richard set the zoo map on the coffee table. It was creased, smudged, marked with Chloe's enthusiastic circles and Drew's chaotic arrows. A completely ordinary thing — and somehow it felt like proof. Proof that today had existed. Proof that something in their small orbit had shifted, even if just by a fraction.