She gingerly chewed small fragments of the croissant, enjoying it less and less, half listening to Alice, who was now relaying how she’d had to check – double check, triple check – that Ted knew Charlotte’s routine, knew where Phoebe’s cricket kit was, wouldn’t forget Wilfy had a birthday party to attend on Saturday afternoon and the gift was wrapped and hidden in the pantry of their beautiful Oxfordshire home.

Jules often thought that Alice’s home was a perfect reflection of her: it had an old romantic feel, with its crumbling, ivy-clad walled garden, a stream running along the end banked with daffodils in the spring, but with a contemporary edge; the extension they’d worked so hard on, joining the old house with their renovated barn, made entirely from glass. Inside, the colours were bold, like Alice had been when they first met at le Bal: deep indigo blues, striking shades of plum and emerald, always shot through with a dash of something you wouldn’t expect – tangerine or lime or steel – but after seeing it couldn’t live without.

For a long while, Jules had tried to emulate the same look. She’d often experienced the opposite problem: the things she wore or selected for her flat in Clerkenwell, before she lived with Paul, should have worked, but they didn’t. She could never tell why, didn’t realise until she showed someone else the dress and shoes, or sofa and rug, and read their reaction, figuring out if she’d made a hit or a miss. It was tiring and eventually she’d employed a personal stylist who’d ripped through her wardrobe ferociously, throwing most of its contents into sacks for the charity shop and providing her with the perfect capsule wardrobe and hints (instructions, really) on what to pair with what. She couldn’t bear to bring them to the charity shop so instead they resided ‘in storage’: the fitted wardrobes in the guest room.

‘He’ll never remember it’s in the pantry.’ Alice was eye-rolling and Jules had to suppress the urge to eye-roll herself. Surely Ted could figure this stuff out? He was a partner in a venture capital firm. He could manage the weekend calendar of a twelve- and two eight-year-olds respectively, couldn’t he? Yes, he’d secured the role through family connections rather than stellar intellect, but he had more than two brain cells to rub together. She felt her stomach clutch as she thought of how attentive Paul was with her appointments and schedule, his precision with her hormone injections. She just knew that he wouldn’t be that sort of parent, that she wouldn’t need to fawn over the tiniest of achievements. If only he were given the chance.

The thought of Paul shot a dart of sickly nausea into her throat. The guilt began to billow in her chest. Each time it happened, she told herself not to feel guilty. She told herself it wasn’t her fault. She told herself she hadn’t done anything wrong. But it always caught up with her eventually.