She wore T-shirt and leggings, defiantly, under a big warm jumper. She wandered through her flat, vaguely bereft, and almost went into the office to get a head start on planning for next term. She went and turned on the TV, flicked through iPlayer, got up and found her laptop and looked up how to sign up for other streaming services, and decided it was a huge waste of money really. In desperation, she wondered if the school gym would be open today.

Thirty-eight and alone. Thirty-eight and independent, successful, proud of the good work that she knew she did every day. In a few days she would be getting the train to Sussex, sleeping not in her childhood bedroom—thank God—but in the crooked little box room of the seventeenth-century cottage her parents had bought as a retirement project. And then she’d be yet another self for a few days, the Saffy that was, not even eighteen but thirteen, sloping around the house feeling pointless while Mum did battle with the cottage’s terrible plumbing and Dad worked on his garden. Church with the family on Christmas Day. Leftovers on Boxing Day. The dead week between Christmas and New Year. It was usually a bit of a relief when school started again.

It would probably be nice to see the whole family. Her older brother John had two children approaching their teens, both of whom were fairly sweet. Primary school age was not Walden’s preferred genre of child, but by age eight or nine they were basically sensible human beings, curious and interested in the world, not yet victim to the cruelties of puberty and therefore perfectly straightforward to talk to. And both of them liked Walden, in the way that children generally approved of an aunt who took them seriously and did expensive birthday presents.

Walden knew John wasn’t thinking of Chetwood for them. Her sister-in-law didn’t like the idea of boarding school. Come to think of it, John must be fifty next year. What a number! At Walden’s age, he’d already had the wife, the mortgage, the prospect of kids. None of those things existed in her life, or would. She had her career, her boarding school lodgings, and the Phoenix.

And someday she’d be fifty.