In the hall, on the way back out, Cate hesitates, for Hannah’s bedroom door is ajar. Outside there is laughter, the red tip of Lissa’s cigarette carving the air as she talks. Cate steps inside. She fingers the linen throw that lies on the large bed, then goes over to the wardrobe, where she takes out one of Hannah’s simple silk shirts, feels its supple weight between her fingers, then puts it back. She goes to the chest and opens the top drawer, and here she stops, breath caught—Hannah’s bras and knickers are laid out in matching sets. She fingers one of the bras—it is the sort of bra only a woman with very small breasts can wear: two thin triangles of lace with a bright flash of silk on the edge. One is red. One blue-green. One is the color of lightest pink. Cate can feel her heart racing. She did not know Hannah owned bras like this; Hannah, whose exterior is so Spartan, whose edges have always been so clear. There is something about the sight of these bras—something insolent and secret and potent—that hits her like a punch to her stomach.

Quickly, furtively, she takes off her sweater and her own bra (large, nondescript), managing to fasten Hannah’s on its widest clasp. She turns it round to the front, pulls up the straps, and stares at herself in these two triangles of nothing, edged in blue-green silk. She knows then—she has lost. More than the house and the sofa and the engagement and the knives on metal strips and the jug just so, and the successful ten-year relationship, it is the sight of these bras that tells her that in the fierce, unspoken race she and Hannah have been running since they were children, she has lost.

Over the next days she feels herself slipping, as though happiness were a dance whose steps she has forgotten. She counts her breaths. She counts her blessings, she tries to rationalize—why should it matter what her friends are doing? Why should her happiness be indexed to theirs? But it is. Somehow, it is—she cannot help but take inventory of her life; her lack, at thirty-three years old, of any of the markers that constitute real adulthood. She is beginning to loathe her job, taking the tube every day to Canary Wharf, going hat in hand to meetings with bankers who believe that in giving you a minute of their time they are changing the world. This job that will never give her enough to buy a home, to buy good clothes.