‘Your life? What about Emma’s?’ Poor Emma, crying her eyes out at her own graduation, terrified of becoming a single mum. Yvonne had been calling her often since, letting her know that she wasn’t alone and also pushing her to tell Geoff. Now, it’s clear why Emma didn’t want to.

‘What about us?’ Yvonne asks, but of course there is no ‘us’, and Lewis shows this by turning away from her and putting his face in his hands.

It’s too much to think of the baby as being Lewis’s, but even the idea that Emma thinks there’s a chance it is, well, it’s enough to make Yvonne stand and step away from the table.

‘Please sit down. Yvie, please.’

‘I should have known this would end badly.’

He looks up and reaches across the table for her hand. ‘It’s not ending. It doesn’t need to end.’

‘It does.’ She pushes between the tables and out onto the street.

‘Yvie?’ he calls behind her.

She walks on, quickly towards the tube station, taking a breath deep enough to make herself dizzy, anything to stop her crying, because if she starts, she won’t be able to stop. He grabs her by the arm, ‘I get it, okay. I get why it’s awkward for us to see each other now. So why don’t we wait it out? See what happens?’

‘Then what?’ she snaps. ‘If the baby’s not yours we pick up where we left off? But what happens if it is yours?’

He squeezes his eyes shut for a second. ‘I don’t want us to stop seeing each other.’

‘We have to. Surely, you can see that?’

He says nothing, but she knows him well enough to recognise each little flinch of his face, she knows he feels it too, that this is the end for them.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says.

‘About which part?’

‘All of it.’

And a little part of Yvonne imagines what it would be like to never see Emma again, to cut the friendship off completely and choose Lewis instead. It’s a terrible thought, one she wouldn’t even consider for any other guy, but Lewis is different, being with him is different. She had talked to her brother Claude recently about ‘a guy she was seeing’. And as much as she tried to keep it vague, Claude had laughed, put his arm around her shoulders and said, ‘I can’t believe my little sister has fallen in love for the first time.’ It was embarrassing and of course she and Lewis had never said anything of the sort, but she could feel it when she was with him, she knew Claude was right. And now it was all over.

As she walks down to the train station, wiping her eyes, she tries to picture Emma and Geoff’s blackface baby, but the image no longer comes to her.

Chapter Eleven