That was the only time you’d been to their house, because you felt so awkward there. They had peonies in vases, and Le Creuset pans, and a magnetic knife rack with proper, monogrammed knives, and different-sized wine glasses for white or red, and acres of white linen on the huge bed you passed on the way to the baby’s room, and the guest bathroom, with its cut-grass scented soap. The house, in retrospect, wasn’t that remarkable – just a modest terrace on a street in Kentish Town – but it felt at the time like being at someone’s posh English parents’, and you’d thought how strange it was that this, now, was her life, a quantum leap away from bedsits and flatshares and badly carved-up Victorian houses and boxy shared-ownership starter flats.

But what struck and maybe discomfited you most was how devoted she was to him: as if, after all they’d done, there wasn’t the luxury of being anything else – exasperated, or bickering. It had seemed to you an exhausting way of living; although you wonder now if maybe it wasn’t that at all, but rather the knowledge that they’d found each other too late in life, or in his life at least, to be reckless, or 124casual; that the way they loved was careful and tender not because they didn’t, but because they did love each other with a sort of abandon.

You have Riedel wine glasses and Dartington Crystal champagne flutes yourself now, and Japanese knives and a proper knife-sharpener, and sometimes even peonies in vases, or at least in a vase. Where has it all come from? How have you graduated, almost without noticing, from novelty shot glasses and wine glasses nicked from pubs, thick-rimmed and engraved with measures, to this? How have you come so far from your Pioneer parents, their bottle of Shloer at Christmastime or weddings, the single blue bottle of Harveys Bristol Cream they kept as a concession to your grandma? A wedding of your own; a marriage to a producer with extravagant Christmas and birthday and anniversary tastes. And yet: you can’t shake the sense that it has all crept up on you without your wanting or asking for it, without your feeling any different than you did at twenty-nine, twenty-seven, or, yes, twenty-four.

Can I ask you something? he says, and you say, inexplicably flustered, Sure.

He picks up the book, which has fallen to the floor, and opens it.

Do you really believe in – well, that? he says. That people are mean, and bad, and – for want of a better word – damned?

He looks at the mean and bad people for a moment 125before closing the book and reaching to slide it back into your tote bag.