‘If we roasted the potatoes and steamed the broccoli,’ Peggy said. ‘What would we have with that?’

Greta thought about it. ‘Do we have any eggs?’ she asked.

Peggy thought about it and tried to remember the fridge. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘We must have some eggs.’

‘We can’t have the quiche again though,’ Greta said. It was getting a bit beyond a joke.

‘But we could try to cook an omelette,’ Peggy said. It was Diane’s idea really. She’d written it down on a scrap piece of paper she’d found in her handbag at a meeting. She’d asked them how cooking was going, and they said they were still making the quiche and she hadn’t laughed. She’d looked at them with a neutral face and said, ‘That’s great. You could make an omelette one night,’ and they looked at her blankly. Was this even something people outside of restaurants could make? They nodded slowly. ‘I have a great recipe for an omelette,’ she said, and wrote it down. When they looked at it, they suspected it wasn’t really a special recipe – it was just a basic omelette, but this was the love she had for them. She wanted them to maintain their dignity, but she also wanted them to stop cooking the quiche every night. At that moment, she wanted more for them than they wanted for themselves. That was how it worked, really. When they started helping other people, they would start to understand this love. She said they would, and she was right. It was a strange kind of care, a powerless care, like whispering into a gale-force wind. Like picking up one piece of rubbish at a time. But it was pure as well, it was special. They’d only ever experienced it for each other before.

‘Yeah.’ Greta smiled. They were doing okay. They were suiting up and showing up. Heidi and Dell would come home from work and they would have dinner for them – they would have come home early and made them dinner. ‘Roast potatoes, steamed broccoli and an omelette. That sounds like a meal. For sure.’

They looked at each other now and all the bullshit fell away for a minute. They looked at each other in faith and with trust, like it would all be all right or at least it was all right, right now.

‘Let’s do it.’ Greta stood up.