Mia’s questions circled inside Audrey’s head.

Regret. It was such a powerful word, a word that implied the desire for an undoing. And that wasn’t how Audrey felt about her marriage, her children, the family to whom she’d devoted the best part of her life. So many times she’d imagined parallel versions of herself: an Audrey who’d written that letter, got a deferred place, started university a year later, and completed her degree in spite of the odds stacked against her. An Audrey who might have fulfillled that teenage ambition to sit behind a mahogany desk in a university English department, preparing the next lecture for her enthusiastic students.

But each of those scenarios demanded an impossible unraveling of her life. Because there would be no Jess at home, no Mia sitting opposite her. None of the past forty-four years as she’d known them would exist. And that was unthinkable: the untangling of a life back to a moment of critical decision. Audrey could never know where that other track might have led her, could never know what kind of a journey it might have taken her on. All she could know was the family she’d have needed to give up in order to find out.

“I don’t regret it, no. It’s not regret so much as melancholy, maybe. A mourning for alternative lives you can never know. Do you remember those choose-your-own-adventure books you used to read when you were little? Life is a bit like one of those, except in real life you can’t go back to the beginning and start again.”

Mia let out a heavy sigh, her eyes still blotchy.

“What is it, Mia? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. Just what you said. It’s got me thinking, that’s all.”

Audrey squeezed Mia’s hand, studied her granddaughter’s smooth, elastic flesh in contrast to the delta of veins rising up beneath her own skin. “Mia, if you can get to the end of your life without having accumulated too many regrets—your regrets, no one else’s—I think you’ll be happy with the life you’ve led. It’s easier said than done, I know. Just try not to get to my age burdened by too many if onlys.”

Mia smiled but it was as if something was trapped behind her eyes that Audrey couldn’t reach. “Look, Granny, everyone else is heading back to class. We ought to go too.”

“Are you still free afterward, for our trip to the Tate? We can have lunch there before my choir rehearsal this afternoon.”

Mia nodded. As Audrey slid back her chair and pushed herself to her feet, there it was again: the sharp stabbing sensation in her shoulder. She ground her back teeth against the pain, breathing slowly and counting the seconds until, she hoped, it would subside.

As they headed out of the canteen and back up to the art room, the pain in her shoulder still needling inside the joint, Audrey thought about what she’d planned for their trip to the Tate and couldn’t be sure whether the violent knocking against her ribs was a feeling of fear or hope.