All she really wanted now was to be the best mother possible to Zoe, but she was pretty sure she was failing at that too. She’d read so many books and articles on how to make divorce easier on kids the advice swirled around in her head. She was trying hard to put everything into practice. She’d been careful not to say a bad word about Richard in front of Zoe (although she used plenty of bad words when she was alone in the shower), and she tried to keep everything around them as normal as possible. She forced herself to get up in the morning and smile and pretend to be fine when she really wasn’t fine at all and would gladly have spent the whole day in bed. She told herself that she was modeling coping strategies for her child, and that was what mattered, wasn’t it? It didn’t matter that inside her head she was a mess.

Between lying to her mother, putting on a brave face for her child and forcing herself to be polite to Richard even when he was being frustratingly unreasonable and uncaring and nothing like the man she’d married, she’d forgotten what it felt like to actually express her true feelings.

There had been a time when the prospect of Nicole coming to stay would have lifted her mood, because if there was one person in the world she could be honest with, it was Nicole. But not anymore.

What was she doing here when the last thing she needed was more emotional stress? She didn’t know if she was a fool or if this was the very definition of friendship: showing up no matter what.

Promises made when you were fifteen didn’t seem to make as much sense when you were thirty-five. They certainly hadn’t meant anything to Nicole.

Hurt and tired, she reached for her phone and sent a message.

Are you on the train?

A flash of headlights caught her attention and she froze in her seat as another car approached. It drove past without stopping, and she let out the breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. She wasn’t built for subterfuge.

When Nicole had called her asking for help, she should have said no.

She was particularly frustrated with herself because she’d recently done an online course on assertiveness, thanks to a twenty-minute wait at the hairdresser, where she’d foolishly fallen into the trap of doing one of those magazine questionnaires.

If you answer yes to more than three questions, you may have a problem with being assertive.