Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,

While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,

And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue

They had been sitting at the table in the garden one evening when Saoirse told her she couldn’t have children. She hadn’t known then that Gabriela was already pregnant with Sadie. It had made it awkward, telling her about the pregnancy mere months later, though she said all the right things, squealing when they asked her and Jim to be, in the loosest sense of the words, Sadie’s godparents. But beneath the expression of excitement, Gabriela could see the pain in her friend’s eyes. She could see it every time she whinged about Sadie’s lack of sleep or yet another kids’ party or the countless ways in which she found herself demonstrating her reluctance to be a parent.

And though it had been easy to tell herself they had simply lost touch, that they drifted apart in the way that old friends do, when she thought of it, when she really looked into the past without blinking, making herself study it in a way that was both painful and momentarily blinding, she knew this was not the whole truth.

Saoirse disapproved. Of the mother Gabriela was, or rather the mother that she had failed to be. The mother Saoirse had never had the chance to become.

It was the unspoken line between them, the force that quietly pushed them away from one another.

The morning of Sadie’s fourth birthday, Gabriela had taken the train to Bath to meet the estate agents who were supposedly overseeing the rental of her mother’s house. Burglars had got in while the current tenants were away on holiday and there was a dispute over liability relating to certain items which the insurance company was refusing to cover.

It was another glitch she could not afford to deal with. The previous tenants had left the place in a state and the costs of the repairs when they left had hardly been touched by the deposit the agency had taken, and the only course of action, as she saw it, was to go there and put a rocket up their arses.

Saoirse and Jim had been staying the night. By the time she got home at around three that afternoon, emotionally frazzled, only to find Tom had yet to pick up the cake she had ordered two weeks earlier in order to ensure it would be ready for the big day, she was ready to kill.

‘Jesus Christ, Gabriela, it’s just a cake, calm down.’

‘Calm down? Tom, it’s a cake I ordered for our daughter’s birthday, not for the day after our daughter’s birthday …’

‘I’ll go and get it now! People aren’t coming for another hour.’