‘The potatoes! We’ve got to get the potatoes on!’ Maisie’s voice rises in amusement and frustration. ‘Come on Mum, that’s your job.’ She is grasping a vegetable peeler in wet hands and looking annoyed enough to use it on her mother.

Becky looks up, disorientated. ‘Sorry, yes.’

‘I worry about you sometimes.’

Becky smiles. ‘What’s to worry about? Other than this mountain of food to chop and slice and fry and boil in time for your dad’s friends.’ The kitchen table is a mountain range of stuffed shopping bags. Becky rams a few items into cupboards, bending cardboard corners to fit, and switches on the kettle. ‘I forgot the streamers, and the balloons, and I meant to do a banner. I was going to write Happy Birthday You Old Bastard, in glitter – but he’ll have to make do with a 15 Today badge.’

‘Did Matthew talk about Amber last night?’

Becky keeps moving, and has to work to pull all the surprise out of her voice.

‘Amber Heath? No, he didn’t.’ She keeps her voice breezy, turns away to the cupboards and pulls out salts and spicing and rubs. ‘Can you pass me that … that thing?’ She motions to a spatula. ‘She’s just an actress trying to drum up some attention while she works out her disappointment at losing a role. Storm in a teacup. We had better things to talk about.’

But try as she might, in the last few days Becky has struggled to find any kind of peace, finding herself battling between an image of Amber between castings and gym visits and lunches and beauty appointments, strategizing and wringing the situation for all the publicity she can get – and another image of Amber broken and barely able to get out of bed. An online gossip outlet has recently published a picture of her in tracksuit bottoms and oversized sunglasses, hair scruffed up in a bun, which could cover both the realities Becky is imagining.

Things come back to gnaw at her. DB’s anger with Matthew. Antonia storming in to see him long before any story broke online. And her own skittish memories of seeing Amber there, her mouth opening as if to say something to the woman she must have seen in the kitchen. What had she intended to say?

Becky clasps a palm to her stomach where it twists and complains, and reaches for a clean chopping board from the dishwasher. A carving knife, positioned blade up, catches the end of her finger and a bead of blood forms at the tip. ‘Shit,’ she says.

‘Language!’

Maisie speedily hands her a folded clump of kitchen towel which Becky squeezes around her finger. Fleetingly her focus shifts and Becky finds herself understanding the calm relief that people report after cutting themselves.

Then she files that feeling away.