“Oh? Give Hannah a break?” Lissa turns to Cate, her teeth bloody with wine. “What about me? What about giving me a break, Cate? Cate the moral compass. Showing us all the way. You think you’re so fucking squeaky clean? Whose fault is it that I didn’t get that part?”

“Not mine,” says Cate.

“Fuck you,” Lissa spits.

Cate reels back as though she has been hit.

“Then—I’ll tell you why you don’t want children, Lissa,” says Cate, leaning back into the fray. “Because you’re fundamentally selfish. Because you’re never going to want to put another person before yourself.”

They have never argued before, Cate and Lissa. Not like this. It is exhilarating. With the wine and the cigarettes and the balmy spring night, it is like a drug. They want more. They could imagine brawling in the street. Tearing each other’s hair out. Taking bites out of each other’s skin.

Hannah watches them. There is something erotic, she thinks, in their arguing. She feels strangely bereft.

People look towards their table. These three English women with their quirky clothes and their loud voices and their empty bottles of wine. How rude they are. How incontinent they all seem.

Cate

SINCE THE DINNER SAM HAS REFUSED TO MEET HER EYE. HE IS asleep in the mornings, waking late and hurrying out of the house to work, then stays out later and later after his shifts. Still, she is often awake herself when he comes in at one, two, three o’clock. She does not go to him.

She has called Hannah, but Hannah has not picked up. She has sent her messages—Can we talk? Call me when you’re ready. Han, we need to talk, call me. Please. Hannah has not replied.

She remembers Hannah’s face on the bridge. The cold clipped way she spoke. The razor-sharp edges of her hurt.

She wants to say sorry, but she wants to say too that it is not fair. That Hannah did not tell her—did not give her the chance to do the right thing.

The only person she has heard from is Dea.

Emergency Mum Club? Whenever you’re ready. Just say the word.

She has not written back.

The days are short and bitter and she stays inside, the heat on too high. Tom is fractious, picking up on her lack of ease, and her patience with him is thin and frayed. She shouts at him often, and often he cries. And then she shouts some more. When she does go out, the roads are icy and treacherous. There are carolers raising their reedy voices to the spires in the center of town. They are selling Christmas trees in the garages of Wincheap—trussed in plastic. The students are still in the Senate building. The wet black branches of the trees.