Sometimes there are children in the park below. From this distance they are small packets of energy, jerky and joyous and untrained. They ride scooters along the paths. They trail after their parents and stop and pick up stones and look at them. She watches the children look at the stones and their parents, more often than not hurrying back to them, grasping them by the wrist and hauling them to their feet. If she had a child, she thinks, she would not rush and pull, she would get down on the earth, she would get down beside them and look at the stones.

OUTSIDE THE WORLD marches on, and Christmas looms with all its gaudy inevitability. She has said she will go up north, to Jim and Hayley’s, but now she would like to refuse the invitation to her brother’s house. But she has given her word, and there are presents to be bought: her parents, Jim, Hayley, Rosie. After work she walks towards Covent Garden, weaving past the tourists, the carolers, everyone buttoned up against the cold, but she does not buy presents. Instead, she wanders into clothes shops, trying on things she would usually never wear: an ankle-length dress covered with a print of crawling vines, earrings that graze her shoulders, high-heeled boots the color of blood. Her reflection surprises her—her bangs falling into her eyes the way they do. It is months since she has had her hair trimmed. Perhaps, she thinks, she will grow her hair long. Perhaps she will shave it all off.

One freezing afternoon, on Long Acre, her eye is caught by a child in a stroller—a little girl. The child is grinning and giggling, clapping her hands. The stroller stops and Hannah looks up. The woman pushing the child is staring at her, her head to one side.

“I’m sorry,” says Hannah.

“What for?” says the woman. There is something crow-like about her, something unsettling about her gaze.

Hannah pushes her hands into her pockets. “I just—” The child is chattering to herself, absorbed by her reflection in the shop window beside her. She has cheeks like a child in a picture book. Her hands are large and dimpled and strong.

“Do you need healing?” says the woman.

“Sorry?” Hannah’s eyes switch back.

“Do you need healing?” the woman says again. “Perhaps I can help?”

The woman reaches into the back of her stroller and pulls a printed piece of paper from a small stack. “Here,” the woman says, holding the leaflet out. “Take it.” Her tone is surprisingly brusque.

Hannah obeys, reaching out and taking it, folding it in half.

The woman nods and then, as though it is absolutely in her power, this holding and releasing of the gaze, she looks ahead and walks on.