Page 65 of In the Same Boat

‘Right – so what do we do?’

‘Well, we make them feel uncomfortable right back,’ he says confidently. ‘They think it’s good for us to get on, great, we should weaponise it.’

‘Okay, but how?’

He shifts properly upright now, suddenly looking more animated than he has all evening. ‘Think about it. They’re enjoying this because they’re in a dream, we’re in a nightmare – so we give them a taste of the nightmare. We show them that, yes, we are getting on well, too well, in fact.’

‘I’m an engineer, not an actress,’ I remind him. ‘I problem-solve for a living, and even I don’t know how to counter that issue.’

‘Well, I problem-solve at work too,’ he says.

‘Your dad says you sell video games?’ I check.

He frowns at me.

‘You’re not impressed by that, eh?’

‘I didn’t say that,’ I insist. ‘I just meant that I… What problems do you solve?’

‘Do you play video games?’ he asks.

I shake my head.

‘Every part of them is problem-solving,’ he tells me. ‘Strategy, skill, execution.’

‘Execution feels like a bit of a nuclear reaction, but I’m not ruling it out,’ I manage to joke.

He smiles.

‘Look at them, in there, about to rip each other’s clothes off,’ he tells me. I daren’t look. ‘As happy as I am for them, it’s not fun to watch.’

‘Tell me something I don’t know.’

‘I will,’ he replies. ‘Something you haven’t thought of. Because if they see the two of us like that, trust me, they won’t like it.’

I almost choke on my drink.

‘Hear me out,’ he insists.

‘Erm, I’m not sure about that one,’ I reply.

‘We make them feel so uncomfortable, like secondary characters in their own love story, outmatched and outpaced by their kids – they’ll hate it,’ he says.

I hate that there’s logic in that. Actual, functional logic. A solution to a problem. At work, we would probably call it ‘out-of-the-box thinking’. For me, it’s more of a desperate measure.

‘They’re acting like lovesick teenagers,’ Nico continues. ‘Fine. We become worse.’

‘Worse than that?’ I ask as I watch Hank feed Mum a grape.

‘Much worse,’ he replies.

I laugh before I can stop myself.

‘We’re capable of that?’ I check.

‘We’re on the edge,’ he reminds me. ‘We’re capable of anything.’

‘You want rid of me so bad that you could pretend to be head over heels in love with me?’