Nina ordered champagne. ‘No sparklers!’ she emphasised, but the weight on both their shoulders wouldn’t shift so easily. Alice was worrying about Charlotte, Ted and the embarrassing messages to Mr Hough. Nina was worrying about the baby, her baby, and although she had only been taking tiny sips of any alcohol when she had to over the weekend, she was starting to feel uncomfortable about that too. As much as she had been trying to ignore it, or to tell herself she didn’t want it, there was a baby inside her and that meant something, didn’t it? What it meant, she wasn’t sure. Both women looked down at the table, lost in their own thoughts, the liquid in their champagne glasses – Alice’s half empty, Nina’s barely touched – vibrating with the bass.

‘Jules is right. You’re not drinking, are you?’ Alice said and Nina wondered whether she should seize the moment. Tell Alice about the baby. But her thoughts were too jumbled, tied up in what had happened before. She didn’t know where to begin.

‘I don’t drink as much these days,’ she said, which was true, but she knew that ordinarily she would still have drunk something. ‘And it aggravates my IBS,’ she added, but it sounded feeble, like she was clutching at straws.

Suddenly Jules appeared. She seemed longer limbed, her dress catching more light, her hair more lustrous and full. She was electric. Gliding, euphoric, on a high. She slid on to the circular leather couch and reached for the champagne bottle and a glass.

It was unspoken between Alice and Nina that they would drop their conversation now Jules was here.

‘Did you win?’ Nina asked.

‘Oh, I won,’ she said, beaming. ‘When in Paris!’ The champagne bubbled and fizzed in her glass. ‘What’s happening?’ she added quickly with a frown, as she clocked the downcast mood.

‘It’s nothing,’ Alice said quickly. ‘Just me moaning about motherhood. I’m sorry. I know I shouldn’t moan.’ She stopped. She’d had enough of pretending her life didn’t have its own challenges and they were of equal weight to Jules’s. Maybe it was the champagne talking but everything felt overwhelming, and she needed to offload to her closest friends. ‘But…’ She took a deep breath. ‘I’m finding everything so hard at the moment.’ Her voice was low, catching on her words as though she were struggling to maintain control. Her friends only just heard her over the thrumming bass in the club.

There it is, she thought. I’ve done it. And in the same way as when she asked Ted a question about the kids or spoke to the headmaster at Charlotte’s school, she braced. Because her problems weren’t as deep as Jules’s. She had a family, children, the one thing that Jules wanted and couldn’t have; and complaining about it, when they were here to support Jules before her IVF, wasn’t on. She took a deep breath, her teeth digging into the flesh of her cheek, in anticipation of the fallout. But she needn’t have. Jules, imbued with a bonhomie Alice couldn’t recall seeing in her since their early twenties, angled herself towards Alice and swung an arm around her, squeezing tightly.