Frankie was in the bath, playing with her bath toys, three brightly coloured water-squirting plastic vehicles. She squirted a long stream of water at Helen and giggled so hard that she lost her balance and slipped backwards under the bubbles. Helen lunged for her and hoisted her back up, holding her breath for the imminent cries, but Frankie just looked surprised and then, realizing she now had a Regency-style wig of bubbles on her head, laughed even harder. Helen laughed too, even though her vintage silk blouse now had a long wet streak down the front.

‘Come on, time to get out. Alice is going to read you a story. You promise to be a good girl for her?’

Frankie nodded vigorously, sending bubbles flying around the steamy bathroom. Helen was privately slightly bemused by her three-year-old daughter’s devotion to her surly teenage half-sister. Alice had the sort of grudge against humanity that made Pol Pot seem positively benevolent and, worse, since she’d started dating Larry, there was more than a faint whiff of booze around her. Alice’s beautiful caramel-coloured skin was permanently caked beneath a thick layer of dark foundation to hide spots that were barely visible to start with, and her soft black curls had taken on a limp defeated appearance.

‘Teenagers,’ Sean often said, definitively. ‘They’re all the same.’

But were they really? Helen wondered. She lifted Frankie out of the bath, with the towel twisted in front of her body to form a tight handle so she could lift her without touching her – a favourite game. She giggled again as Helen set her down on the bathmat and hugged her wet body close. Her almost-black hair was plastered in spikes to her head, and her brown eyes laughed as she hugged Helen back. Like Alice, Frankie had caramel skin, a shade lighter than Helen’s. Sean was the only Caucasian in the family, something that confused people when they learned that the two girls were half sisters – as if it did not compute that a white man could choose not one but two black women as mothers to his children.

For a second Helen thought of those two other sets of parents, both within three miles of their own house, who no longer heard their babies giggle, could no longer feel their dense fragrant warmth in their arms. It was unspeakable. For the dozenth time she felt anxious about leaving Frankie with Alice.

‘HELEN!’ bellowed Sean from the front door. ‘They’ll have given away our reservation if you don’t get a move on! Let Alice do it – Alice, can you go up and take over, please?’