The phone is ringing.

In a heartbeat I’m up, scrambling over Becca, who mumbles and stirs. I glance at the clock as I streak past. Five a.m. It’s not good, it can’t be good. My head roars as I grab the receiver.

38.

EMMA

Yet again, Emma had not made it to bed. She sat cross-legged on her living-room floor, encircled by photos, occasionally lifting one up and angling it toward the light.

Intermittently there were footsteps from above. Steph was still awake, too, maybe listening to Emma’s movements just as she was hearing Steph’s, feeling the other woman’s presence and trying to predict what she was thinking. Emma glanced at the Chertsey address lying just beyond her moat of photos, a reminder of the decision she had to make. It seemed even more complicated now that she suspected Zeb hadn’t told her the whole truth about Freya. She kept picking up her phone to text him, then putting it down again. I’ll Skype him in the morning. Look him in the eye and ask calmly.

The pictures she was sifting through were mostly of him. In one, he was six months old and she held him on her knee, still a kid herself, the baby seeming physically to overwhelm her. Perhaps most parents divided their existence into the era before they’d had children and the era after, but Emma often got the feeling she’d lived her life on shuffle. At times she felt ancient compared to her friends, who used Tinder, drank fifteen-pound cocktails, and never seemed afraid. Other times she would try to embrace her early thirties: She’d allow herself to be set up on dates but would usually chicken out, telling herself she was a mum and a businesswoman, no room for romance.

She stalled over a picture of herself in school uniform, year ten, not long before she’d fallen pregnant. Automatically, she started picking faults. Her arms were awkward twigs, her chest was concave, eyes too big for her face. Suddenly she was that girl again: that spiky, slow-to-develop teenager, who felt as if a layer of her skin peeled off each time she was taunted by the class bully.

Not even the class bully, in fact. Her own personal bully, or so it had seemed, who would relentlessly single her out, always accompanied by two silent, smirking disciples.