Andrew pulled a face. “Yes. It’ll be her first time alone with her. I had hoped to get my mum round as well—I was selling it as a sort of granny-bonding movie night—but that won’t be happening. Grandma jealousy is real! They compete over everything to do with Matilda. It’s the battle of the babushkas in our house every time my mum crosses the threshold.”

“But your mum is so calm and lovely,” Nory reasoned. “She makes Miss Marple look like Cruella De Vil.”

“Or so we all thought.” Andrew snorted. “Throw in an interloper grandma from America, and she’s a completely different woman. She keeps trying to prove her seniority. It’s all ‘Glenda darling, that’s not how Matilda likes it at all!’ Or ‘You wouldn’t know, Glenda dear, you don’t have the same bond with Matilda that I do, I’ve been here from the start!’ ”

Nory was trying and failing not to laugh. “I just can’t imagine it. Quiet little Nina with her embroidery club and volunteering in the cat café,” she said.

“It’s all been a facade—she’s a power-hungry diva granny! I’m surprised she hasn’t been scenting the baby’s things.”

Nory pulled a face.

“At least with my mum there, Glenda’s eccentricities don’t have the chance to take hold. We’ll probably come home to find Matilda and American Grandma wearing matching pearls and twinsets.”

“But it’s nice that they’re both so enthusiastic?” Nory ventured.

Andrew huffed. “I’d prepared myself for the challenges of raising a tiny human, but nobody told me about the perils of trying to contain two competitive grandmas.”

Nory was trying to get herself into the party zone, but it wasn’t easy. She had booked the work do at Brasserie Zédel, a rather marvelous Art Deco restaurant in Piccadilly. She’d told Ameerah she would meet them there, but her best friend and Dev—recently upgraded from man-Barbie to actual boyfriend—insisted on coming to call for her. Nory suspected this was so that she couldn’t feign an illness at the last minute, which she had considered. It was annoying when your friends knew you so well.

She had given up messaging Isaac. As desperate as she felt, she refused to torture herself further by watching the unread messages pile up. Whatever had begun to bloom between them had been most assuredly stamped out of existence, and she would just have to face it.

The green velvet swing dress was suitably festive and flattered her body shape in all the right ways. Her hair was pulled into a loose chignon and her makeup was done, the thick liquid eyeliner accentuating her hooded eyes. To an outsider, she would look like a whole person and not the empty decorated shell she felt.