Her mother was busy decanting eggs from a bucket into cardboard egg boxes. The family had always sold what they couldn’t eat by way of an honesty box at the end of the farm track, and as a child, taking the little key down to the road, opening the coin box and emptying its contents into her waiting hands had been a highlight of Pip’s week. Sometimes she had been allowed to keep a coin or two to buy sweets or a comic from the corner shop. More than once her friends had encouraged her to syphon off a little of the egg money for themselves, assuring her that her parents would ‘never know’, but Pip had always refused. Partly, she liked to think, this was to do with the inherent integrity that had steered her towards a career in the law. Truthfully, however, she could never be sure that her mother wouldn’t know exactly how much should be in the box and catch her stealing. A fear of being caught and causing disappointment was the greatest deterrent of all.

‘Will Dominic be coming this weekend?’ her mother asked, without looking up from her task.

The question was lightly posed, but Pip could hear a thread of tension in her voice.

‘I’m not sure,’ she said, even though she wasn’t expecting him to come. ‘He’s very busy, Mum. You don’t get to be a QC by sitting around on your backside, you know.’

‘No,’ her mother said quickly. ‘No. I’m sure you don’t.’

Pip was pretty sure her mother didn’t know that QC stood for Queen’s Counsel, nor what a prestigious position that was to hold, but she had given up trying to explain how the bar worked a long time ago.

‘And his diary is full with non-work stuff, too, things that I would have been doing if I wasn’t stuck up here. You do realise, Mum, that we’re big news, Dominic and me? We get invited to all kinds of events, parties, shows, gallery openings. You name it. He can’t just drop all that because I’m not there to go with him.’ Pip sounded petulant, childish, but she didn’t care.

‘No, no, of course not,’ said her mother. ‘But you have been quite ill, Pip. I’d have thought he’d try to make a little bit more of an effort to come and see you. I hear him ring sometimes . . .’

Pip bristled. Did she have no privacy, even with her mobile? It was like being a teenager and having to sit on the stairs to use the landline whilst her mother earwigged.

‘. . . but a phone call isn’t the same as actually coming to visit.’

But she knew her mother was right. Dominic’s trips to the farm had tailed off, and she missed him, missed the glimpse that he gave her of her old life. And when they did speak, she could feel him floating further away with every conversation. He seemed to struggle to find a connection with her when she wasn’t in London, as if a link in the chain that held them together had broken. He told her his news, but when she had almost nothing to say in return, the conversation fell flat. Pip knew she should trust that everything would work itself out when she got back home to London, but that was getting harder to do with each passing week.