Emma’s eyes slid up to meet her neighbor’s. Her head was still fogged, heart still booming, but a tiny part of the puzzle was inching into place. “Oh . . . no,” she said. “Zeb’s not my partner. He’s my son.”

A surprised silence filled the room. Awkwardness shimmied up the back of Emma’s neck. It wasn’t in anticipation of the explanations she’d have to reel off, wasn’t because she cared that Steph might gape at her as people often did, scandalized that she, with her petite stature and electric blue hair, could have a six-foot eighteen-year-old son. It was because it suddenly looked as if she’d kept Zeb a secret. Emma hadn’t let on that she had what her neighbors feared to lose, if not in touching distance, then at least within some kind of reach. It hadn’t seemed appropriate, or kind, to bring it up in any of her recent conversations with Steph.

“I thought . . .” Steph’s eyes moved around the room, clocking the photos of Zeb she obviously hadn’t studied the last time she’d been there. Emma felt something expand from her chest as if to envelop all the pictures, all those reluctant, self-conscious, precious smiles.

“I had him when I was fifteen,” she said. “He looks older than he is. And I guess I look younger . . . as long as you don’t peer too closely.”

Steph drifted around, nudging framed photos, like somebody spoiling for a fight by prodding a rival in the shoulder. Emma wished she would stop, but how could she deny her anything, this woman whose child was even more lost than hers?

“I don’t think you ever properly met him,” Emma tried to explain. “He was at art college, and he worked in a comic-book store at the weekends, so he was out a lot. And now he’s”—she hugged her elbows—“away.”

Steph spoke at last. “How old?”

“Eighteen.”

Steph echoed the number, gazing at Emma’s son who had been her whole life, really, since before she’d even grown up herself. They’d lived with her parents until he was thirteen; rented a house with a garden and a plum tree while the shop was doing well; swapped it for this flat when profits had started to fall. And then everything had seemed to go very wrong, very quickly, both with Zeb and her business, as if the two were as intrinsically connected as her heart and brain.

“I didn’t realize,” Steph said. “Didn’t realize you were a mum too.”

It was as if Emma had added to her neighbor’s grief with this secret she’d barely been conscious of keeping. Then Steph seemed to snap out of it, whirling around and pointing again at the photo strip, which Emma was still holding. “What was he doing with Freya?”