It was a lunch they’d organized for Tricia – one of the girls from the office – to celebrate the recent birth of her baby. A pizza in the Italian on Ranelagh Road – and Tricia had taken her new baby girl, all bundled up in a soft downy Babygro, like a little pink parcel being handed around the table, each of them having a go holding her. When it was Leah’s turn, she had sat still and quiet, looking into the baby’s squashed face, tiny curled fists held close to the little one’s cheeks, Leah trying to quell the thudding of her own heart. She avoided babies as a rule, but on this occasion, she had allowed herself to relax, her defences temporarily down. Absorbed in the peaceful miracle of holding a sleeping child in her arms, she hadn’t noticed the waitress approach with the tray of coffees. It was not until Tricia called sharply, ‘Hey! Careful there, would you?’ that Leah had looked up with sudden alarm, anxiety waking like an angry beast in her chest. The waitress, handing out the coffees, had blithely lifted the brimming cup from the tray and passed it over the child’s head before placing it on the table.

‘God, I can’t stand the way they do that,’ Tricia had hissed, once the waitress was out of earshot. ‘I mean, haven’t they any awareness? Any common sense?’

Leah handed back the baby and excused herself to use the bathroom. None of them had noticed the change that had come over her. Nothing had happened, yet the vulnerability of that infant’s head throbbed in her thoughts. In the cubicle, her legs were shaking so hard that she had to reach out and place both hands on the walls, trying to steady her nerves until the trembling stopped.

Those girls have no idea of what she’d done.

‘I always liked Tricia,’ Jake says, flipping through his script.

He knows all the girls from the office. His courier route meant he was regularly dispatched to the patents firm where she worked. It was how they had met.

It would seem like such a small thing, what had happened to her at lunch. He wouldn’t understand her reaction. To explain it, she would be forced to open up the side of her she locks away; she would have to let him into the secrets she keeps hidden and she cannot countenance that. Not now, not this evening when there are other things she wants to tell him. So she says nothing.

Leah slides the fish into the oven and opens the wine.