I spent a lot of time online in a cafe by the river, pretending to be working and instead shopping for pirate-­themed party items. Cups and straws and pencils and pots of bubbles and tablecloths and balloons and miniature water guns and candles and tiny yo-­yos, each with a different pirate image stickered on the outside. I roamed over the Internet, selecting and eliminating options faster, more efficiently than I ever had been able to do before: I could feel the energy building up behind my eyes, a sugary power, a vertical ascent.

Sometimes, I could think of nothing else. At night, I began to see parrots in my dreams, huge ships with dragon prows, a soft rain of chocolate gold coins. During the day, I was getting very little work done; clients were beginning to send terse emails, scrapings of politeness meant as weapons, certain phrases chosen to wound.

We are disappointed that . . . We would expect . . . We hoped . . .

Always we, even from clients who had previously used I. The wounding was easier, I surmised, if done from a point of to­­­getherness. I could feel work slipping from my fingers, but felt unable to stop it: my mind was too fast for it now, it seemed. It could only skim above each task, picking up the briefest of facts.

Despite this, life continued, a new version of normal, a mode of being we adjusted to quickly: I still picked the boys up from school every day, even though Jake was at home, filling the lounge with coffee cups and the wrappers from cereal bars, headphones on, typing, his laptop resting on his knees. Working, I supposed.

I still cooked all the meals, loaded and unloaded the washing machine, the dishwasher, texted the parents of the boys’ friends, arranged their after-­school clubs, their haircuts and playdates and new shoes and eye tests. Some things fell by the wayside: the house was often untidy, neglected. Looking at me with scorn. But I went out to work: I came back to more work. I was being good.

And in this state of mind there was a new clarity too, as though my mind had been refreshed, its speed becoming something sharper, my perceptions cleansed of the unnecessary. For years, when Jake had taken the children out at the weekends – to the park, maybe, or swimming – I had been convinced that one of them would die. This would be my reward for asking for time alone, for preferring it, however briefly, to the company of my family. Selfish mothers don’t deserve their children. Somewhere, somehow, I had heard this, or felt it, ingested it in cereal perhaps, taking the message like fortification, like the dawn: something completely natural, entirely inevitable.