It was strange to see how completely it looked the same. The large, once-grand window frames, lined and cracked with age, still bore the creases of generations. The round window that looked out of the attic still had its stained-glass bird angled up, a swallow reaching for the sky. The door was the deep red that Avigail had loved. The trees in the front garden must have grown, but they’d been so tall, so unequivocal before, that they seemed to have stayed exactly as they were – the size that serious trees should be. It was like stepping into the past. For a house that had been standing for two centuries, though, the six years of his absence probably seemed like nothing. A blink.

He could remember how he’d felt standing on this step for the first time – no Eva beside him then, no Eva in his life. Just the idea for an article that would expose Avigail Goldsmith. The woman so keen on exposing FullLife herself exposed as a fraud. Except that he hadn’t found her to be a fraud, exactly, just someone convinced she was right despite all evidence to the contrary.

Avigail had been so certain there was evil intent behind the baby pouch she’d sounded almost insane when he interviewed her for that article. Raving against a technology that everyone accepted as a benefit to society, unable to accept she’d been wrong. He’d encouraged her to talk about her theories, describe the conspiracies she believed in, requested her ‘evidence’ – which was mostly leaked memos and research papers about the role of epigenetics and the extent to which the environment of the foetus could alter genetic code expression. It was old research. It was not a smoking gun.

But then there was the noticeable lack of a father for her daughter. He hadn’t known Eva was adopted, had assumed a woman like Avigail would only have considered natural birth for her child. And there were the clothes – the hippy dresses and the beads. And this old house that looked as if it hadn’t been redecorated for fifty years, the crumbling grandeur, the luxury of old money. The personal story was more entertaining than the research. He’d paint her as the last of an old generation that had no place in the new world. And that moment of spite had brought Eva to his office and changed his life.

He didn’t even know if Eva was still running her mother’s protest group. He hadn’t heard anything about it, but then he’d forced himself not to look her up.

In the end his article about the ‘Jewish heiress and anti-pouch activist’ Avigail Goldsmith hadn’t even been widely read. He’d just put it out there – the nastiness he was capable of – and the only people who noticed were himself and Eva, standing furious in his office as his heartbeat drowned out his thoughts.