Lulu tried to summon to mind all that she knew about her father’s friend Jane. She was a friend of her father’s rather than of the family’s, an old friend from his university days, short-legged and slight, with dull brown hair, a mild manner, and the air of someone who expected to be disappointed. She had had a hard life, Lulu had always been told: her husband had abandoned her several years into their marriage, leaving her alone to raise their son, a slightly unpleasant boy, who had once stolen Sophie’s Mars bar and later denied it. She lived in a poky house in Cambridge, was a good cook, and had once served a bread made with cheese and rosemary that Lulu a little shamefully remembered considerably more vividly than anything Jane had ever actually said to her. Lulu had met Jane maybe half a dozen times in her life, and each time she had, Fee had reminded all her daughters in advance of the meeting to be kind and polite because of Jane’s hard life. Fee had always been pleasant to Jane, but Lulu realized now that she had no idea of whether or not she genuinely liked her. And now David was making telephone calls to Jane when he thought he could not be overheard, sitting downstairs in his office while his wife was upstairs giving counsel to a stranger, calling Jane “sweetheart,” and confiding to her about his marriage. Fee hasn’t noticed, he had said to Jane. And then, sadly, Fee doesn’t seem to notice very much of anything about me these days. Lulu wondered now exactly what it was that Fee hadn’t noticed that she presumably should have. She wondered—since her father, at least, was apparently not as happily married as she had until now supposed him—exactly how unhappy he was and for how long he had been so. She remembered a Sunday a couple of weeks previously when she had walked into the house to hear her parents arguing and her father shouting, “For Christ’s sake, Fee, will you for just once in my life let me finish a whole sentence without interrupting me!” and remembered that she had been mildly amused at the time, but wondered now if she should rather have been concerned. She wondered if David’s jokes about Claire had been really jokes at all, or whether they had been the only way he could find to express that he would rather spend his life with a less assertive sort of woman than her mother, a woman more like, yes, Jane. She wondered, if her father were now deciding he would rather deal with Jane, who was so very different from Fee, whether he would have preferred to have daughters who were different, too.

A car horn sounded urgently, and someone grabbed her by the arm, startling her. It was Tom.

“You okay?” he said. “You were about to walk into the street.”

Lulu looked up to see the car, a light blue Volkswagen, whose driver, a pleasant-faced middle-aged woman, raised infuriated hands at her as she shot past.