Shall I cut it up for you? he says, and you laugh in embarrassment as he tears and butters your bread roll, forks up 120cubes of chicken, the way you might for Tilly.

You don’t manage more than a few bites before it all becomes too much – the bizarre intimacy of this stranger feeding you.

I’m fine, you say, I’m actually not that hungry, and it’s true, you haven’t been for a while, and not just because of the jet lag, or since the initial shock of your cousin’s death, but for weeks now, maybe even months. You know you’re getting thin, and you’ve brushed it off and blamed it on running after a toddler, and you’ve made an effort, for her as much as for you, to make yourself eat. But the hollow feeling at your centre, the ache in your solar plexus, voids all hunger, and it feels somehow right to be at a light-headed remove from the world, this sense of being vague, and insubstantial, as if you could just drift on, indefinitely; as if you don’t really exist, or need to. Sometimes, you think, your daughter is the only person who feels real, because the immediacy of her needs is so urgently, incontrovertibly so.

So what do you do, he’s saying, as if he’s reading your mind, or are you a full-time mom? and you’re saying, No, I’m an architect, then qualifying it with, at least I used to be, because what, actually, do you do now with your days, beyond endlessly push a buggy round the city streets, taking photographs, not even with your SLR, just screens’ and screens’ worth of photos on your phone, stone detailing or glazed-brick facades, ghost signage or board-marked concrete, large Queen Anne sash windows or tiny Huguenot busts to hold shutters in place, not even for any reason, 121you’ve even stopped bothering to upload them to your laptop any more.

From November, you say, when Tilly turns two, you’ll have the nursery place: three mornings a week to begin with, then when she settles, the afternoon sessions too. Your husband says you should take on some private resi. Leaflet the neighbours. Loft conversions or extensions, something to keep you busy, get you working again. He’s begun to say lately that you could set up your own practice, as if he doesn’t know the first thing about architecture, despite being married to you all these years. But at the same time he’s sort of right: what else are you going to do with your days?

He nods, listening, and you find yourself talking on.