The idea of her daughter made Lydia panic. — I’ve tried to ring her but she doesn’t answer. She’s somewhere in Glasgow, I suppose, doing whatever it is students do. Of course she’ll blame me, you know how she adores her father. Everything’s always my fault.

She looked challengingly at Christine, to see if her selfishness was shocking. And Christine was shocked: she was sure that her own first thought in such circumstances would have been for Isobel, protective of her, dreading Isobel’s loss even more than her own. But things had been raw recently between Lydia and Grace; and Lydia had always complained, half-joking, that she was left out because her husband and her daughter were so perfectly attuned. She couldn’t reinvent herself and her relationships in one instant of change.

— I thought that perhaps you could tell her, Lydia said. — You’re better at that sort of thing.

Christine was about to protest, but you’re her mother, then she stopped. Who knows: if anything had happened to Alex, she might have found herself behaving just as selfishly – towards Sandy, for instance, Alex’s son by his first wife, Christine’s stepson, whom she struggled to love. Everything is provisional, she warned herself. In the next hours our perceptions will change over and over in a speeded-up evolution, as we adapt to this new torn-off shape of our lives. At every point our duty is to watch out for these stricken ones, for Lydia and Grace, not to say or do anything to hurt them. Then she thought, but I am stricken too. We’re all stricken, Alex and Isobel and I, even Sandy – and all the people at the gallery. Without Zachary, our lives are thrown into disorder. Of all of us, he’s the one we couldn’t afford to lose.

In the back of the taxi the women hardly spoke. They didn’t want the driver to know what had happened; their news wasn’t ready to go into the world yet, it was still inside them, hard as stones. Seizing Christine’s hand in the darkness, Lydia pressed it into her velvet jacket against her stomach, bending double over it, crushing Christine’s fingers against the metal buckle of her wide belt; Christine smelled the musky, wood-notes perfume her friend always wore. — Do you have a pain? she whispered. Lydia nodded, not letting go. They were vaguely aware of the driver’s apprehension, thinking she was drunk and might throw up.

The lights were on in the windows at home, and Alex was standing looking out for them. By the time they got upstairs, he had the front door of the flat held open. He opened his arms to Lydia and she stumbled into them.