She sank down to the floor herself, wrapping her arms around her legs as her whole body shook.

She needed her friends. Still on the floor, she leaned over to her handbag in the hall, retrieved her phone and opened their WhatsApp group, When in Paris, but time had brought with it an awkwardness she didn’t know how to navigate. What would she say to them now? How could she explain? Where would she begin? They had ghosted her after her terrible behaviour that weekend and she didn’t blame them. Who would?

A familiar feeling began to vibrate in her head; a buzzing in her ears. Without giving it any chance to develop, she swiped out of WhatsApp and searched for a meeting, her eyes quickly scanning places and times until she found one.

I will suffocate you, she said to the impulse, the part of her that was running ahead to apps and races and games: anything that might blur the edges of the pain caused by Paul leaving.

She heaved herself upwards, pulled on her trainers over her work tights, a look she would have hitherto died rather than replicated, and ran, as fast as she could, to the meeting.

*

Alice

Vita gazed round the room approvingly. The labia-flower wallpaper, in an ochre-yellow and midnight-blue colourway, looked opulent and vivid in Vita’s bedroom. The ceiling had been painted a metallic gold, which shone, iridescent, as the subtle ceiling light, a square of gold, was dimmed. Real flowers in shocks of electric blue and violet sprang from a vase in the shape of a woman’s torso, love handles and voluptuous buttocks included. ‘Very, very nice,’ she purred. ‘Seriously, you should be doing this as a job. I have two friends who’ve already asked me for your details.’

‘Will they pay me?’ Alice joked, because Vita knew all about what had happened last time Alice tried this for a living. To Alice’s immense gratification, Vita had paid Alice the day she had finished, a pre-agreed amount (‘Charge me the same as the Mantels!’ Vita had instructed) and she still said she felt like she was ripping her off. ‘I should be paying you double that,’ she had grumbled.

‘Yes, they will pay you,’ she said now. ‘And those Mantels should too. Richie, my last husband, sees them at these City functions, presiding over everyone like Jesus! I told him. Those women are cheap!’

Alice smiled. Everyone loved the Mantels. They were the darlings of the philanthropy scene. That’s what made their rejection of her work sting so much.

‘I know what your USP is,’ Vita said, a finger tapping on her bottom lip. ‘You make things sexy. But not in a black-satin-sheets way, you know. Your look is very sumptuous. You notice the little details,’ she said approvingly, her fingers in a chef’s kiss. Jules had said something similar to Alice once. Something about the little details, making the best of a unique feature, be it a person or an interiors project. Alice knew what she meant. She’d grown up self-conscious, had learned from an early age how to accentuate something she liked – like her arms – rather than something she disliked – like her middle. And that had made her feel sexy, self-possessed, in a way that she hadn’t really felt since having the twins. She’d been too tired to notice any of the attention to details of herself, Alice Digby (she was definitely going to change her name back to Alice Digby formally when she had the energy to). She’d allowed herself to fall into a rut, accepted the pitifully small affection she had received from Ted as part of parenthood, but she felt the stirrings of change, of new beginnings, as she looked around at her work.