She pressed Send and felt a rush of panic at the prospect of everything she had to do. How was it possible to be this tired and still be standing upright? And it wasn’t just the rough night’s sleep that had done her in. Recently, with her amped-up workload and preparation for the interviews she’d been undertaking, things had started to spiral so that some days she felt so overwhelmed she had to hide in a cubicle in the bathroom and remind herself to breathe. To complicate matters, she couldn’t tell Tom about her recent job application. As far as he was concerned, she was still working under Madeleine as she had been when she was in Hanoi. To tell him about the change in circumstances would have been to give him a voice in the conversation around her career that she simply didn’t want him to have.

Perhaps she was thinking about the satisfaction she’d seen on his face those mornings while she was on leave when he went out on the job with Jim, the look that belied his insistence that he was happy to stay at home while she went out to work. Perhaps she wasn’t willing to start a dialogue that might lead somewhere she didn’t want it to go – and maybe that was perfectly reasonable, given her history.

She was able to draw a line between her desperate need for control and the experience of being abandoned as a child. She understood that a therapist might have rationalised the increasingly secretive behaviour as another manifestation of her need to manage aspects of her life, triggered by the inevitable chaos of becoming a mother – and the shift in identity that comes with that.

There was also another, more simple possibility: that she was just selfish.

By the time she got to the tube station at 8.35, having dropped Sadie at the nursery, she felt like she had been put through a blender. As she reached the platform, rats scuttled through the arch of the tunnel, heralding the arrival of the train.

Exiting the tube half an hour later, she had to push against the wind that blew through the station, ducking into a coffee shop where she ordered a double espresso before making her way to the bathroom. The tap spat out hot water, scalding her hands as she rinsed off the soap.