“It is. It’s just . . .” She gives a small laugh. “I don’t know. I’m doubting everything today.”

“I could have said that.”

“Really?” She is silent, waiting for him to go on, watching his hands around the pint glass. His eyes—the thin skin beneath them, the curled edge of his mouth. Say what you see.

You’re sad.

You’re angry.

“I don’t know.” His fingers drum the stained wood of the table. “I just—I can’t even remember why we are doing this, this thing that our lives have become. Hannah. This constraint. Every. Single. Fucking. Thing. Regimented. Policed. Whatever I put in my body. I see her, hovering. Watching the coffee I drink. Asking me how many drinks I’ve had if I go out after work. Counting. Always counting. She’s become a policewoman.”

He falls silent.

“She’s just trying to have a child,” says Lissa softly.

“Don’t you think I know that?” He is furious now. “But that’s all she’s become. She has become a creature that is trying to have a child. And it’s not fucking working. Shouldn’t a child be conceived from love? And abandon? And good sex? Not a timetable. A spreadsheet. A graph.”

He has said too much. She sees him step back from his words.

He looks up at her. “Did you never want kids?” he says, in a low voice.

“I—no. Once. I mean. I was pregnant once.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.” A blurred shape on a scan photograph at the Marie Stopes clinic in Fitzrovia. The end of the first year of drama school.

“What happened?”

“I had an abortion.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. Here.” She lifts her whiskey to his. “Slainte.” It burns her throat. “Cigarette?” she says.

“You read my mind.”

They step outside, huddling in the doorway, taking it in turns to roll.

“Go on,” he says again, when they are both lit. “You still haven’t told me why your day was so shitty.”

“Someone . . . criticized my acting. I took it badly, I suppose.” She tries to find an anchor—the rain, the cars with their lights on. The people maneuvering their umbrellas. She is rapidly becoming drunk.

“Sometimes I feel—there’s so little tethering me. Sometimes I don’t feel real.” She turns to him. He is watching her. He is close. He shakes his head.

“What?” she says.

“It’s just so strange to me, to hear you speak that way.”

“Why?”

“Because I always saw you as so vivid. More than real.”

She gives a small laugh.

“I remember the first time I saw you. You just—you shone. And then those parties. When we were older. That gorgeous thrift-shop raver.”

“Yeah. What was I thinking?”

“They were good, weren’t they, those days? We didn’t care, did we? We were free.”