She was grateful to be sitting down because her legs were wobbling. Her whole body seemed to be swept up in a sense of inevitability. It was like she didn’t need to think through to the next step because the next step had already been decided for her, and that was a relief.

Her hands stopped shaking as she opened the app. As the roulette wheel pixilated on the screen. She put it all on red. And she lost.

12

London, 2018

She stared at the date on her phone, still in her dark trouser suit from work. All day she’d been trying to avoid it. She knew she shouldn’t work out her due dates, but each time she was unable to resist. Now they sat silently alongside the calendar year, unmarked but ever present, permanently filed away in the storage system of Jules’s brain. How many hours left of today? Another four, still. Too many. She swiped away from her calendar and into her favourite gambling app. Her favourite not because she won with them more, but because they gave the best free stakes when she lost.

It had started with Jules’s weekly homage to her father: a flutter on the horses. A flutter. A twist. A stick. Moved on to cards, like they used to play. It was something in common between them; they’d always played games together since she was young. Board games, then chess. She knew he admired her mental agility. He was proud of her and she basked in that glow, like a cat in a pool of sunshine, warmed through, skin to bone.

As she got older the subtext to it changed, so subtly that only Jules could see the difference. He loved to see her win. Prizes, scholarships, trophies. And she loved to win for him. She loved to hold whatever accolade she was collecting and to look out across the hall or sports field and see the apples of her father’s cheeks so hard and shiny from grinning she could imagine them slicing through his skin. It was in their DNA. They were the same, something her mother and brother could never understand. ‘Maybe you’re working too hard?’ her mother would frown, and Jules and her father would catch each other’s eyes, discreetly raising them in a look of recognition: she didn’t understand. But Jules did. Jules got it. She wanted only to be like him. She wanted independence and freedom and money. She really wanted money. She wanted to fix her face and buy a nice house. She wanted all the things her father had. And she didn’t see anything wrong with that.

It didn’t become a problem until after her second miscarriage. Jules, who had always been so good at achieving, was no good at falling pregnant and no one was quite sure why. But they fixed that, they made it happen with IVF. And for a month, Jules felt on top of the world. She was a solution-driven person and the solution had been found. Until it hadn’t. She miscarried a month later. And after another successful round of IVF, she miscarried again. Now they had a different problem. Jules could get pregnant, but she couldn’t keep the baby. None of the high-achieving years that preceded this prepared me for being such an abject failure as a woman, she would think, tears streaming down her face. Her shame was so acute she couldn’t even tell the girls. She couldn’t tell a soul.