Eight years ago, when she moved to the area, a Jamaican guy owned this place. It was painted the colors of the Jamaican flag. He sold fresh and saltwater fish, vegetables, and other odds and ends in the back: incense, reggae on bootleg cassettes. He had the most beautiful face. There was a campaign to help, when his shop was sold from underneath him to a property developer: articles in the Guardian by local writers, a sit-in on the premises of a café on the street—a place owned by the same developer. An angry meeting was called in the church hall, which they all attended—Hannah remembers a guy in his fifties, face livid with anger, standing and shouting, I remember when it was shit around here. It was much better then.

But now the ripples have been smoothed over, now marble tiles and line-caught fish have replaced pineapples and salt cod and plantains. This fishmonger is no longer new. And, despite an occasional, residual queasiness, Hannah likes it, with its day boats and its flirty young men and its sense that the sea is still full of abundance—that all might yet be well with the world.

It is her turn at last, and she duly flirts a little as she buys medallions of monkfish, asks advice on what else she might add to the pot, buys saffron and samphire, and stows them in her bag. She is sweating as she leaves the shop—the first sign of the hormonal dip. Her scalp is laced in it. This is the hard part, the part they don’t tell you about, the down regulation, the menopause brought about in three weeks, your hormones suppressed to ground zero: the day sweats, the night sweats, the constant urge to cry.

But she is good at not crying—has it down to a fine art. She does not cry when woman after woman at work announces their pregnancy. As day after day she takes her temperature and marks it on a graph. As month after month she bleeds. And when her oldest friend told her she was pregnant, Hannah held her very close, so Cate would not see the expression on her face.

Outside she weaves past the coffee shop with its inevitable strollers clogging the pavement, her gaze grazing the babies, the parents with their fists clutching cappuccinos and flat whites. She is good, too, at not looking closely at the children—it is not wise to stare at a baby’s plump arms, at a toddler hand-in-hand with its mother, a newborn slung across a father’s chest. But as she passes the flower stand, she stops, her eye caught by the display. The woman with the stall turns to her. “What do you need?” she asks. She is in her late fifties or early sixties, her eyes are blue.