There was the volume of messages in the class WhatsApp groups. Forget the workplace, this is where the real battle for feminism was lost. Ted outright refused to join them. I don’t have time for 60 messages on whether it’s PE today or not, he would say, eyes to the heavens, and Alice would snap, Neither do I, but one of us has to be on there. This passive-aggressive snip-snap had become the background patter to their relationship. Alice hated it. Wished she could return to the days when they would swoop around Paris together, making plans for their future. For travel and good food and long sunny days. It was like she’d been sold a luxury villa holiday via a glossy brochure but when she’d arrived she was on the ground floor of a grotty block of apartments, cockroaches for company and a view of a construction site.

And then there was the time dedicated to the puzzle of Charlotte: parent Facebook support groups, online articles, podcasts, books, meetings with the headmaster who, like Alice, was at the end of his tether. It can’t go on like this had recently changed to If this happens again it will be a fixed-term exclusion. The pain Alice felt at those words. At the judgement of her sweet little girl, who’d spent the first few days of her life asleep on Alice’s chest, who’d followed her around with big smiling eyes every morning asking, ‘What be doing today?’ and who now, more often than not, shouted Shut up! at her, while slamming doors. Her little girl who, in Alice’s better moments she understood was scared, afraid, lost, and in her weaker moments wanted to be far away from, she wanted to prise those sticky fingers, which gripped her so tight at the end of the day, away from her. That little girl who she sometimes looked at and thought she’d been mis-sold a dream. And then she hated herself some more.

She could never explain it to Jules, who was desperate for her own children, or Nina, who wasn’t interested in them. They’re all hard work, aren’t they? Nina would say, but the truth is they weren’t. Wilf and Phoebe were sailing through life. The contrast between them and their older sister was palpable: a gulf of experiences. One marked from her first day at school as naughty, difficult, volatile, the others praised for their conformity, their adherence to the rules: A pleasure to have in the class! A delight to teach! Charlotte heard all this and she knew she was different, however hard Alice tried to protect her. Mr Hough as her form tutor this year had been a blessing; he had quickly recognised her neurodiversity and engaged the school’s SENCO, liaising with her to ensure Charlotte got some support, but the damage had been wrought in the intervening years. Charlotte was anxious in school, traumatised by her experiences, prone to explosive tantrums when she felt overwhelmed. Alice wondered sometimes how much more it would take to break her, the fruitless pursuit to make her square peg of a daughter fit into the round hole of school.