Mark Sutton

They have a young kid.

Jeremy's a kind of loving dad.

He and Madeline, who is French,

have this kind of jokey rivalry about whose turn it is to look after the kid, but they seem to be able to have these little discussions throughout, little mock fights almost, without any malice or antipathy coming apart, as a good relationship possibly can do.

And I think it's one of the ways that it shows up almost the coolness of Tom and Clara's relationship is that

Madeline and Jeremy are seemingly able to get to the heart of matters very quickly without getting annoyed at each other, and that also happens in their conversations with others.

Madeline's telling Tom, you can just apply for a job in France.

Here's how to get the visa.

Here's how to do all this.

She's a person who...

has solutions and can tell people what they should do and discuss things openly, as is Jeremy to a degree.

But Tom and Clara are very bad at talking about things within their relationship.

And when issues come up, they can fester for days.

And it's almost like a standoff of who can go the longest way.

without addressing the elephant in the room of our relationship, which is a very strange way for our relationship to happen.

But also in the way that Luke Horton writes it, it feels like a very true depiction of a type of relationship and one that, when you're reading it, is subtly stressful in this kind of slow burn because you realise that there's this...

something something dark and festering at the heart of their relationship in their inability to talk about things confront each other move on and yet as a reader you're trapped within the very you're trapped within tom's consciousness and he perhaps even more so than clara is very unwilling to grapple with or deal with the issues facing both his career his relationship his situation in life

You can almost not imagine two worse ways of dealing with these situations coming up against each other in a relationship as something that would cause tension.

It may well work that way.

But in terms of what we were just saying about Tom being an anxious person prone to panic attacks, Clara has what is actually quite a traumatic experience about midway through their holiday in Bali, where the