Sarah never let anything show to her colleagues and fellow partners. She made it a rule never to talk about her children. She didn’t mention them, kept no pictures of them framed on her desk. If she had to leave work for a doctor’s visit, or an unmissable appointment at school, she would say she had an ‘outside meeting’. Better to say you were leaving early for ‘a quick drink’ than because your nanny couldn’t stay late. It was better to lie, to make things up and embroider the truth than to admit you had children. Children were synonymous with chains, ties, constraints. They compromised your availability, blocked your career path. Sarah remembered a woman at her old firm who had made partner, then announced she was pregnant, and found herself demoted, relegated to the lower ranks.

It was a kind of abuse. Mute, invisible abuse, a kind of everyday violence that no one dared to challenge. Sarah had learned her lesson: she had said nothing to her superiors about her two pregnancies. Amazingly, her bump was barely visible up until the seventh month, even for the twins; as if, deep inside her, the children sensed they had better keep out of sight. It was their little secret, a silent pact. Sarah had taken the shortest maternity leave possible, and returned to work two weeks after her caesarean, with a perfect figure and smile, flawlessly made up; underneath it all, though, her face was tired. Each morning, before pulling in to her dedicated parking space at the foot of her office tower, she would stop at the car park of the nearby supermarket to take the two child seats from out of the back and put them in the trunk. Her colleagues knew she had children, of course, but she was careful not to remind them of the fact. The secretaries could chat about teething and the best baby food brands, but not a partner.

Sarah had built a wall between her professional and family lives. They ran on parallel tracks, never intersecting or overlapping. The wall was precarious and cracked in places; it threatened to topple over one day. But that didn’t matter. She liked to think her children would be proud of what she had made, of what she was. She tried to make up for their lack of time together: quality, not quantity. In private, Sarah was a tender, attentive mother.

And for all the rest, there was Ron. ‘Magic Ron’, to use the children’s nickname. Which made him laugh. The name that had become almost an official title over time.