Margaret still worked from home. She had never fully re-assimilated into the workforce. But it was different now, it would be easy for her to get a good job. It had been twenty-four years and no one remembered. People still found her annoying, but the heat had gone out of it. ‘I just don’t like her,’ she sometimes overheard them saying. It hadn’t changed a thing for anyone except for the women directly involved – to everyone else, it was as minor as a change in theme song. That was what was cunning about it. No one cared about them, because they had been at rock bottom when it happened. Most of them had no family or friends or work, and that was that.

Margaret thought about it a lot. She was sure Heidi did too, but they never talked about it. No one talked about it. It was a massive part of her life that she never talked about. When she talked at meetings about the time in her life when she was two, she was able to say ‘I’ and ‘me’ and, sometimes, she even remembered it that way. For a while Margaret had tried to talk to Heidi about it and one night, when she tried again, she explained how she was having trouble remembering what it had been like when she’d been Peggy and Greta. Heidi said that was the best way to do it. It was the best way to be – it was what she tried to do herself. Forget there even was a Dell. Which was harder for Heidi because, at the time they were having the conversation, Dell was still living in the city where they’d all met, only a few kilometres from their old flat, and she could turn up at any time. But Heidi recommended acting as if there had only ever been one of her. Bisi would say, perhaps from another room, ‘Heidi, would your sister like that coat I’m throwing out?’ And Margaret would shake her head and look at Heidi with her eyebrows raised and Heidi would say, ‘Shut up’ and ‘Like you’re so perfect, Margretapeggy.’