She looks back at the young woman, who is staring now at her thighs, making larger strokes with her brush. Her doll-like, impassive face.

All I am, thinks Lissa, is a collection of lines. There is nothing real inside. Like those bodies her mother drew, all those years ago on the pavements of Tufnell Park. As though it were prophecy—this hollowness. There is only the outline left. She feels dizzy suddenly, and she moves again. There is an audible groan from the other side of the room.

“Excuse me,” she says. “I don’t feel well.”

She stands up, wraps herself in her robe, goes out into the hallway, and lays her cheek against the cool surface of the wall.

Hannah

GATWICK, EARLY MORNING, AND SHE IS AN OYSTER, NEWLY shucked. The wide world presses upon her; the women in their heels and coats, the people who walk quickly because they have somewhere better to be. She feels at once invisible and far too visible in her waterproof jacket and walking boots.

Thirty-six. She is almost middle-aged. Is it worse if men look at her, or not? The tip of her thumb nudges the space left by her wedding ring, a small groove, a ridge of calloused skin, and then an absence. The callus has almost disappeared now, although her thumb still returns to it, like a tongue to the gap where a tooth used to be.

At Aberdeen, she has a layover of an hour before the connecting flight. The airport is full of men. Men with the look of soldiers—although less fit; many of them are huge, red-faced, balding, devouring breakfast and pints at the bar. She avoids them, browsing the racks at the newsstand, thinking to buy a magazine but they all seem faintly ridiculous, so she moves to the book stands. She has read nothing for months. What used to be an innocuous activity is now trip-wired; she wants nothing about love, nothing about children, nothing about infidelity. She lifts guidebooks and puts them back again. She does not need a guidebook. She is capable of navigating by instinct. She is capable of spontaneity. In the end she buys a copy of Emma and a bottle of water. She has read it before. She is pretty sure there are no babies in the book.