He is drifting into sleep. Now. She can either pace up and down the platform until he sleeps more deeply, or walk on, to the tube, and risk him waking up. After a look at her watch, she decides on the latter.

The tube is loud, louder than she can ever remember it being, but Tom, mercifully, stays sleeping, his head on her chest. People look and smile, and she smiles back, but her heart is clanging. What if something were to happen—an attack of some sort? It just feels entirely wrong to have this tiny, sleeping infant in this carriage, this metal carriage that feels as if death could come in so many guises—which is tunneling past the heaped bones of the dead, past the hungry ghosts of the city, and under the river—the river—which in and of itself must be dangerous, must it not? How has she not considered these things before?

She should never have left the house.

Tom sleeps on but she is a tight ball of nerves now, her hand rigid against his back. Please. Please don’t wake. Not now. Not yet. Not till we’re there.

And he doesn’t, the movement of the train keeping him rocked and unconscious—he sleeps still as she wrangles the stroller on the escalator, leaving the tube at Camden, as she takes the train to Gospel Oak, and it is only as she is rounding the gates of the Heath that he lifts his lovely, sleepy head and looks around.

“Oh, hello! Hello, darling!” She is jubilant, on the verge of tears, she is so relieved. “Look! Look at all the trees. The leaves! Can you see? Can you see?”

It is a beautiful morning. The broad swathe of Highgate Hill in the distance is drenched in reds and golds and browns. There are runners, dog walkers; elegant couples in matching down jackets gesticulate as they talk in French, Italian, Arabic. It is the Great World and she is a part of it. “Isn’t it lovely?” she says, taking him out of the sling and strapping him into the stroller, then making her way to the café at the bottom of Parliament Hill—the cheap one, their favorite, the old Italian one where you can still get ice-cream sandwiches and scrambled eggs on toast. She sees Hannah before she has been seen herself, sitting alone at a table outside.

“Hey! Hey, Hannah!”

She is shouting, sweaty and shouting, but she doesn’t seem able to lose this terrible jaunty tone. Hannah looks up.

Hannah stands, a hug—the scent on her neck of something expensive and restrained—and then she bends to Tom. “Hey, little one.”

Hannah is dressed in a sleek wool winter coat; her hair looks as though it has recently been attended to by a very good hairdresser.

“You look nice,” says Cate, gathering her breath.

“Thanks.”