Margaret wound herself into the deep, soft chair opposite the couch. She sat on her feet and looked into her tea. ‘Did you?’

‘Yeah,’ Heidi said. ‘You were being weird, and I left my Tamagotchi phone there.’

Margaret nodded. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘Do you remember?’

‘I remember it differently,’ she said. ‘I remember a Tamagotchi phone that day, but I found it under my bed before you came with the pizza stone.’

‘I left the pizza stone in the letterbox,’ said Heidi. ‘And you were sulking and sad, and not out of bed . . .’

‘I’d been out trying to buy a charger,’ Margaret said. She should have kept quiet, but she blurted it out.

‘Well, you looked bad. And I came round because I was worried about you and the pizza stone was still in the letterbox and I brought it in, and I had my Tamagotchi phone and I put it on the table and then I never saw it again.’

‘This isn’t that Tamagotchi phone,’ Margaret said.

‘Oh,’ Heidi said, and looked at her. Really looked at her.

‘This is a new Tamagotchi phone that a client gave me last week because he thought it was funny and then he realised he could message me on it – like a pager.’

‘It looks like my phone,’ Heidi said, mock-questioning herself. ‘It seems weird there’d be two of them. It looks like the phone from that day.’

‘It’s not that phone,’ Margaret said.

‘It’s got unread messages on it,’ Heidi said. She would be in it in a second. Scrolling through the messages.

‘Well, the client is annoying.’

Heidi nodded. ‘What is this?’ she said, reading one of the messages which was just numbers, from last week. ‘C++?’ She was one message away from the message with her name in it.

‘Python.’ Margaret held out her hand.

Heidi looked at Margaret, then at the Tamagotchi phone. Finally she handed it over. It was like they were twenty-four years younger – in the kitchen, talking about the wording on a Weet-Bix box. The good lives they’d had seemed to fall from them like scales. Like everything was a fight, and Heidi was just home from Ian’s, acting like no one could be trusted. Heidi didn’t seem like that anymore, but she was. She pushed her hair behind her severed ear – Margaret hadn’t seen her do it in years. Neither of them trusted the other because they didn’t trust themselves or the situation. Their lives had been so strange, and the strangeness made them feel vulnerable. They had an idea that the rules didn’t fully apply to them. It was the most dangerous place their minds went. The idea that they were special, somehow singled out – that idea could kill them. They’d seen it. They’d seen it with Dell.

‘What are you thinking about?’ Heidi asked.