E wore a white dress with little eyelets strewn across the fabric like flower petals. They were meant to look careless, you paid extra for that kind of thing, for their perfect off-handedness. I brushed her hair and oiled it a little and braided it carefully. She always cried when I braided her hair, pulling this way and that, undoing the work that had been done, forcing us to start again, but I thought, I really thought that she would one day like to remember my fingers in her hair. I thought that she would remember this love, my love, here, even though she cried now and said it hurt. Isn’t love sometimes like this? We’re always setting ourselves up to remember it.

M dressed B, pulling his little kicking legs through a pair of pants, sliding them up over the fat diaper. The boys I would probably one day call them, and I would laugh and be a woman in her forties and I would roll my eyes a bit and cross my arms in front of myself and tap my foot. We would be a family with pet names for each other, we would be that happy.

I couldn’t find anything to wear. I tried on shirt after shirt but none of them fit. The sleeves were too long, it was almost as if they might drag on the floor. The buttons were too tight. It was suddenly as if I were a grape being squashed down beside the rental-company bed by a monstrous thumb. I was bulging out, grinding down into the cheap carpet. I threw on a dress and ran out of the room, tripping, fast so the mirror couldn’t catch me. I rubbed more foundation over the bruise on my face, dusted it with more powder. I was the last one to the door, the last one to leave the apartment but I was ready now. We all walked out into the hallway and M locked the door behind us. Immediately I wanted to be back inside. To spend the whole day curled up but M was there waiting and B would start to cry soon, would be hungry. So we left the building and walked to the tram stop. I was sorry it was too hot to wear my long coat.

M bought the tram tickets and slipped them into his pocket. When the tram came we all climbed on and rode it down the hill, past the train station and across the bridge over the lake. It was a beautiful day, we could have been in Paris in three hours. We got off the tram and walked past a flower shop where a young woman in a chequered apron was wrangling huge sunflowers with stalks as thick as her own wrists into an enormous bouquet. A bouquet that when lifted, made her, the tiny girl, look lost inside it. She was roping them together like cattle. M bought E a pink flower and she loved it, kissed it, crushed it and left it in the street all in the space of two minutes. Love was like that too of course. Blossoming and beautiful and bursting and delicate and gone. Why pretend otherwise?