She couldn’t even remember the last time she had seen Madeleine. Their lunches had become fewer and farther between with Madeleine so often working abroad, and then they’d stopped. Sometimes when she looked back on that part of her life, it was as if she had dreamt it.

At home she had stopped talking to Tom altogether about her work, besides the brief, passing details of the destinations he believed she was moving between, sometimes for just a few days at a time, sometimes more, as part of her role working government-to-government – and he had stopped asking. With every unasked question, Gabriela felt another of the sparks that had once flickered between them die out.

She told Tom she was off to Amsterdam for a few days, though it could have been the Congo or Bermuda for all that he seemed to notice. She was bored and frustrated to the extent that she had to resist the urge to make her stories more and more outlandish, just to see if there was ever a point at which he would start to question anything.

Ivan had arrived home that afternoon, heading straight upstairs after the briefest of hellos. Gabriela waited for him in the living room, nervous of what had triggered his obvious mood.

The older Layla got, the harder the separation became, with Gabriela’s anxiety so strong that she could still hear her child screaming by the time she was halfway down the street. Layla had started waking in the night again after a period of sleeping through and had just drifted off on her mother’s lap when Ivan breezed into the room.

‘I’m taking Layla to Moscow,’ he announced, presenting this fact as a fait accompli.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘On Monday, we’ll be gone for a week.’

‘What are you talking about? You can’t—’

He looked at her from where he was standing by the fireplace, slipping off the cufflinks from his shirt and placing them on the coffee table.

Feeling her heart beat faster in her chest, Gabriela lifted Layla from her lap, careful not to wake her, and settled her sleeping body on the sofa beside her, before standing.

‘You can’t do that.’

‘I can’t do what? Take our daughter to see her grandmother?’ He sounded genuinely bemused. ‘Why would you care where she is if you’re not going to be here anyway? If you’re so much more committed to your … What would you call them, these “causes” of yours?’

‘Ivan, that is not fair, and you know it.’

He looked at her, tilting his head as if working hard to recognise her.

Avoiding his gaze, she continued, ‘What if something happened, if there was an accident?’

‘Oh, come on, accidents can happen anywhere, and it’s hardly as if you haven’t spent a week away from your daughter before. Besides, Polina will be with us, she is more than capable.’