It’s as if the day has gone into reverse. Amy puts on lipstick and feels like she’s getting ready for work instead of a night out with her husband. There’s something hard and smooth in the pit of her stomach; it’s the shape of an avocado stone, but larger, heavier. She can’t remember the last time she and Matt went out. Before, probably. Most things happened before. She scrutinizes herself. She’s thirty-six, but she looks ten years older; there are hollows beneath her cheeks, and her face has concertinaed into those folds that athletes get when their body fat drops. She’s never been thin before. She always wanted to be slimmer, but now that she is, she hates it. Misery skinniness might look good in photos, but it’s unattractive in real life. Matt winces sometimes when they try and make love, as if he might break her or she’ll pierce him with a hipbone. She tries a smile. It’s what the self-help books say: Smile and then you’ll really start feeling happy! She covers the place where her dress gapes across her chest with a scarf and tucks the lipstick into the pocket of her handbag.

Nick should be here soon, she thinks. He’s late, but then he always is. She goes to check on the children. Theo is sitting up in bed, reading.

‘How fast can light travel?’ he asks, without looking up. Although he’s only eight years old, it feels as if he’s been obsessed with space his entire life.

‘Oh, I know this one! Seven times round the Earth in one second.’

The upbeat voice she tries to use with the children sounds fake and brittle, even to her.

‘How many stars are there in space?’

‘As many as the grains of sand in the sea.’

He rolls his eyes. ‘Wrong.’

‘Okay then. Seventy thousand million million million.’

‘Seventy sextillion, you mean,’ he says, but there’s a grudging note in his voice.

‘I’ve been revising.’ She gives him a kiss. ‘Night, love. You remember Uncle Nick will be looking after you?’ He nods. ‘Fifteen more minutes and then put your light out.’

She peeks into Lotte’s room. There are pink-and-purple unicorns spiralling across the ceiling from a night-light. Lotte, two years younger than Theo, has been in bed for longer and is already snoring softly. Amy touches her forehead with the back of her hand. She feels hot, so she pushes the bedcovers down a little and worries whether it was sensible to let her wear a long nightie. She switches the night-light off, remembering, as she always does, that it isn’t Lotte’s.