It was six-thirty in the morning. I crept in quietly through the back door so as not to wake Sarah. I put Sylvie in her highchair and gave her something to eat. I knelt under her chair, picking up tiny, disgusting pieces of food from the floor. She reached out and took a handful of my hair in her grimy fingers, laughing delightedly. I cleaned her, I changed her nappy, and then I walked down the hallway and placed her on the bed in the darkness beside Sarah. I opened the blackout blinds. There was a steel grille over the window that made the room even gloomier, and which I’d vowed to remove, though I knew in that moment that I’d never get round to it. Sarah was not asleep after all. She’d been lying awake since two in the morning, she told me. Her eyes were red; her face was streaked with tears. She said something that I can’t remember, although somehow everything seemed to be my fault. I had failed in some way that wasn’t clear to me. I didn’t say anything. I kept very still and tried to understand what I was feeling. But I didn’t understand it. Life is mysterious. Hatred is mysterious. Then I caught the train to work. Out the window, in the winter sun, the bare stretches of highway seemed to me as lovely as water.

That morning, I sat at my desk and finished a couple of press releases I’d been too tired to finish the day before. Then I interviewed a professor about his research in drone technology. The university had begun offering drone-pilot training as part of a degree, making ‘unmanned aviation’ available to the service industry. The future is coming, I wrote. In fact, the future was already here. It was being secretly funded by corporate weapons manufacturers. It was called Surveillance Capitalism. I didn’t write that. I fiddled with the website. I tweeted and retweeted, although since I’d been promoted — from Communications Advisor to Senior Communications Advisor — I’d handed over most of the social media to Bec.