Abby looked at me with distaste. She had been gorgeous once, but she’d done something to her face that had left it just a bit out of whack, like that of a robot. Her hair was long and streaked blonde over copper, up in a ponytail. She placed the baby on my bed, setting him down like a handbag. ‘You should be over that by now.’

I had been in America for two days now, and it was hitting me hard. I’d never known tiredness like it, plus the baby slept in a room off mine and he seemed to wake up every hour during the night. ‘Sorry.’

Abby turned, her ponytail slicing the air like a scythe. ‘I have yoga. And Madison needs to learn her lines for the morning. Oh, and David will be home at seven for dinner.’

I hadn’t realised that part of my job would involve cooking dinner – I could barely heat up Super Noodles. But apparently it did, on top of caring for the baby and Madison, keeping the house clean on days the ‘maid’ didn’t come, running errands all over town – which I was yet to do because I’d never driven on the right before – and anything else Abby wanted from me, which was a lot. Abby herself was rarely home, and when she was she was often asleep, which made her carping at me even more unfair. I knew from snooping in her bathroom that her sleep was usually chemically induced. I had yet to see anything of LA except for a supermarket Abby had driven us to, and certainly no celebrities. Brad and Jen looked out at me from the cover of the magazines I’d brought over, as if to mock me with their glamour, so near yet untouchable. Carson had already chewed several pages of one.

I dragged myself up, as Abby’s footsteps rattled down the wooden corridor and stairs and the front door slammed, followed by the sound of the car, the blip of the electric gates in the distance. She was gone. Carson lay there looking up at me, a worried expression on his face as he gnawed on one fist. He was six months old, and I was frantically trying to remember what I’d learned about babies at college, wishing I had paid more attention. He didn’t talk yet and wouldn’t walk for a while, so at least if I put him down he stayed in the same place. Unlike Madison.

Oh God, Madison. I looked up and she was in the doorway. Her sly little face, her golden curls, her frilled pink dress – that was what she wore for a day round the house! I hated all of it. Before this, I wouldn’t have thought it was possible to hate a five-year-old, but I was wrong.

‘Why are you in bed?’ She stared me, just like her mother had.