Jenny said, “It wasn’t a good day. Emma got up on the wrong side of the bed—her toast tasted funny, and the tag in her shirt bothered her, and whine whine whine … And Jack picked up on it, so he was being awful too. He kept going on and on about how he wanted to be an animal for Halloween. I had a pirate costume all made for him, he’d been running around with a scarf round his head saying he was a pirate for weeks, but all of a sudden he decided he was going to be ‘Daddy’s big scary animal.’ He wouldn’t shut up about it, all day long. I was trying everything to distract him, giving him biscuits and letting him watch the telly and promising he’d get crisps when we went to the shop—I know I sound like a terrible mum, but he never gets that stuff normally; I just couldn’t listen to it, not that day.”

It was so homely, the anxious note in her voice, the little furrow between her eyebrows as she looked at me; so ordinary. No woman wants some stranger thinking she’s a bad mother for bribing her little boy with junk food. I had to hold back a shudder. “I understand,” I said.

“But he wouldn’t stop. In the shop, even, he was telling the girl at the till about the animal—I swear I would’ve told him to shut up, and I never do that either, only I didn’t want her to see me make a big deal of it. Once we got outside I wouldn’t say a word to Jack all the way home, and I wouldn’t give him his crisps—he howled so loud he nearly broke my and Emma’s eardrums, but I just ignored him. It was all I could do just to get us home without crashing the car. Probably I could’ve handled it better, only …” Jenny’s head turned uneasily on the pillow. “I wasn’t in great form either.”

Sunday night. To remind her of being happy. I said, “Something had happened. That morning, when you first came downstairs.”

She didn’t ask how I knew. The boundaries of her life had been turning ragged and permeable for so long, another invader was nothing strange. “Yeah. I went to put the kettle on, and right beside it, on the countertop, there was … there was this pin. Like a badge, like kids pin on their jackets? It said, ‘I go to JoJo’s.’ I used to have one like that, but I hadn’t seen it in years—I probably threw it away when I moved out of home, I don’t even remember. No way had it been there the night before. I’d tidied up, last thing; the place was spotless. No way.”

“So how did you think it had got there?”

The memory had her breathing faster. “I couldn’t think anything. I just stood there like an eejit, staring at it with my mouth open. Pat used to have one of them too, so I was trying to tell myself he must have found it somewhere and put it there for me to find, like a romantic thing, like to remind me about the good times, to apologize for how awful things had got? It’s the kind of thing he would’ve done, before … Only he doesn’t keep stuff like that either. And even if he had, it would’ve been in a box in the attic, and that stupid wire was still nailed over the attic hatch; how could he have got it down without me noticing?”