You can get used to anything. That doesn’t make it good, though. After two weeks I had a sort of handle on my life in LA. I got up at five each day, doing my best to avoid the rude awakening of Abby standing over me. Usually I had been up with Carson all through the night, struggling to get the bottle into his shrieking red mouth. I felt like he hated me sometimes, but when he did finally drift off in my arms, and we lay exhausted on my bed, both just breathing, those were the times I was most at peace. He was a cute baby, with chubby legs and wrists. Little butterball, I called him, as I bathed and changed him and rocked him endlessly against my hip. His mother seemed to rarely pick him up.

Abby still got up before me most days. I would find her doing yoga in the living room, or outside, swimming laps in the pool in the pre-dawn, which was surprisingly cold with the chill of desert night air. Or she’d come back from a run, sweating and red, to find me spooning banana into Carson’s mouth. Abby had not acted since having Madison, but she was going on auditions, I knew. I saw scripts lying about the house, parts marked in red. She took a lot of tense phone calls, pacing up and down on the patio, which for some reason they called a deck. Words had been a problem since I arrived – there were always at least three things on the shopping list that I didn’t understand. Baloney. Eggplant. Cilantro. I had never heard of any of these things.

Shopping was another task on my list, but later, after I had woken Madison – she was hard to rouse in the morning, strange for a child her age – and dressed her and fed her breakfast. Already she had internalised the idea that certain foods were bad. She wouldn’t eat cereal or toast, only cottage cheese and fruit, which I had to cut up fresh. I rarely saw David in the mornings – he went in early most days, to beat the traffic. His office was in Santa Monica, which may as well have been in another country from the way people talked about it. I didn’t really understand, because it took me an hour to get most places in London anyway. An LA person would drive twenty minutes then turn around and go home because the traffic was bad, or they couldn’t find parking.