“Please, Steph. I know it looks bad . . .” As Paul implored his wife he glanced again at Emma, a look that made her feel like an intruder. She began to retreat into her own flat. Before the door swung closed, she saw Paul leaning toward Steph, and Steph jerking away, drawing up her knees, like a threatened creature curling into a ball.

Something flamed in Emma. A kind of recognition. Her heart boomed as she leaned against the inside of her door, failing to make out their murmuring voices. After a few minutes she turned the latch and opened it a crack. But the foyer was empty, the lightbulb still flickering, Steph’s hair clasp lying on the stairs with wisps of blonde hair in its jaw.

6.

CHRIS

He must have traveled this route a thousand times. Usually in the passenger seat, his feet poised over his extra set of pedals, suburbia conveyor-belting past as his student drove excruciatingly slowly. The same tree-lined streets and chained-up bikes; the same cars in the same drives. Smug joggers and couples pushing elaborate prams.

Chris also spent a lot of time parked in various spots around Kingston, glimpsing snapshots of other people’s lives while he waited for his learners. Sometimes he’d see a man in a designer suit taking crafty swigs from a hip flask, concealing it when his picture-perfect wife and son emerged from the pristine house behind. Or a homeless guy rummaging through the Waitrose bins, digging out a mushy avocado, shooed away by a self-important store manager. The divide between rich and poor, happy and miserable, genuine and false felt so flimsy around here. And Chris always teetered just the wrong side of the line.

Today Kingston felt watchful. Almost certainly it was Chris’s imagination, his mood, but he’d sensed it from the moment he’d left home several hours before. Neighbors herding their kids into giant Volvos had seemed to blast glances toward his house—but maybe they’d seen the police parked outside the night before and didn’t know who they’d been visiting. Even now, Chris seemed to catch the eye of every pedestrian as his student, Dylan, steered them haphazardly through the streets. He cut the lesson slightly short, needing to gather his thoughts before the next.

“Good effort, mate,” he said when they pulled up with a bump of the curb and a final stall of the engine. Dylan was a student at Kingston Uni, and one of the most timid drivers Chris had ever taught. “Just need to work on that hesitation at junctions. The stalling’s getting less frequent, though, hey?”