Excerpt from The Adults by Caroline Hulse, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Matt shrugged. “Does it matter?”

“If we pull out now, I’ll be the bad guy.”

“I’m not going to drag you there by the hair, Al.” Matt lifted her foot up and placed it down on the floor with a pat, as if dismissing an eager pet. “If you really don’t want to go, we won’t go.” He paused. “I wouldn’t want to go without you—that would be weird.”

“Super-weird.”

“But you always said if you’d met Claire in a different way you might be mates.”

I did, Alex reflected. I said that. But it wasn’t fair of Matt to quote her out of context. Mixing up real, solid conversations and fluffy-cloud, Vaseline-on-the-lens conversations.

Matt put his hands on the table. “I just don’t want to miss another Christmas with Scarlett. She’s seven, Al. She was four the last time I watched her open her stocking.”

“Scarlett comes first, of course. But can’t we just have her here one year?”

“Claire’s her mum. I can’t take Scarlett away from her at Christmas. It’s not right.”

Alex closed her eyes. That was Matt all over, in one illogical sentence. So irritatingly respectful and chivalrous.

She opened her eyes and saw the washing-up in the sink. Perhaps not always that chivalrous. But about this kind of thing, he was chivalrous. About what felt, tonight, like exactly the wrong kind of thing.

Alex watched Matt carefully. “Are you sure you’ve thought it through?”

He gave his mouth a side-twist of thought. “What’s to think through?”

“Oh, I don’t know. There’s nothing complicated? At all? Nothing that might be awkward?”

“Why would there be?”

Alex looked out of the window. In her garden, the security light flickered, flashing her garden into focus in strobelike images.

Flash. Grimy washing line. Flash. Rusty garden chair with the wonky leg. Flash. Tiger-in-a-cape hand puppet strewn across the gravel, the cloth sodden and aged with dirt, left over from a friend’s visit with her baby.

Alex turned back to Matt. She’d always been determined not to infantilize her boyfriend like so many of her friends did, treating their partners like the cack-handed get-nothing-right males who flailed through TV adverts for household products. But he didn’t make it easy for her sometimes. She hated it when he pushed her into this position: making her into the wife from TV adverts, her hands on her aproned hips, lecturing him about brands of paper towels.

Alex leaned forward in her chair, maintaining eye contact. “How do you feel—really feel—about spending Christmas with your ex?”

“These things are only complicated if you make them that way, Al. It’s all in the mind.”

“No lingering emotion or resentment?”

Matt put his head to one side. “I don’t think so.”

“Nothing, however small, left unsaid? Your history’s all empty and wipe-clean? The needle’s back on the start of the record and everything’s peachy?”

Matt sat back in his chair.

“I’m just thinking of you,” Alex added. “A lot of people would find the situation hard.”

Me, she thought. I’d find it hard.

Matt took a while, visibly giving it some thought. “I don’t dislike Claire. I don’t love her and I don’t hate her,” he said eventually. “She’s just ... ​Scarlett’s mum now. And we have to find a way to make it work, because she’ll always be Scarlett’s mum.”

“Of course.” Alex jiggled her leg against the table. “And Patrick? You want to spend a weekend with him?”

Excerpted from The Adults by Caroline Hulse. Copyright © 2018 by Caroline Hulse. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.