Gillem tries to imagine the home in which his daughter grew up. Alone with a single mother? With grandparents, as the French still sometimes do? Or was she the eldest child in one of your more up-to-date reconstituted families with mother, stepfather and a slew of younger half siblings and steps? And Vanessa Bonnet’s refrigerator door? At least she, he can be quite sure, is not so much of a flaming hypocrite as he.

He comes in from his studio for a midday break. It’s Friday, when Kate works at home, which actually means talking on the phone to her sisters, picking up Artemio from school, cooking something wonderful for dinner. She’s a homemaker, Kate: she only pretends to work. All her real creative energy goes into soups and stews and Gillem sympathizes, because he’s just the same, except he cooks on paper, and for nobody’s sustenance but his own. At this moment, she and their housekeeper, Mirjana, are talking shop, while the radio blares the hip-hop station Mirjana favors.

“We’d better make up the spare room,” says Kate. “She is going to be staying with us, isn’t she, Gillem?”

“Yes, when is she arriving, your daughter?” inquires Mirjana. Faintly sulky, because the spare room is her room when she sleeps over: her clothes, her music, even a teddy bear from a boyfriend she’s since chucked are stowed there, to Kate’s annoyance.

“It wasn’t very clear. Sometime in the next couple of days?” Gillem forces out the words over the knots in his stomach.

“I put in the spare-room sheets with the last load of washing: they just need an iron,” says Mirjana. Terrifying, the efficiency of the bourgeois domestic machine, whose digestive juices have already broken down Gillem’s agonizing secret into a question of sheets to be ironed. Why didn’t you tell me, Gillem? Because I thought it had gone away. Because I’d come to believe it—she—was nothing more than a sum that got automatically debited from my bank account each month.

Kate is busy making a shopping list: “Loo paper, dishwasher liquid, cereal, milk, yogurt, juice. Balsamic vinegar. Oh yes, and tea. Anything I’ve forgotten, Mirjana?”

She is still unable to look Gillem in the eye, although he can see she is trying to get over it. He wonders if she has stopped loving him. I don’t know you anymore, is what she’d said. She’d thought he was someone upright. Not an unfeeling coward, a sneak.

“Cif. Lemon Cif. None of your generic brands,” pronounces Mirjana, with a mock-stern glare at Kate.

“Mirjana, you are such a snob,” says Kate fondly. And, glancing at the kitchen clock, “Goodness, I’m late.” In answer to Gillem’s inquiring glance, “I’m having lunch with Constance.”