Abraham looked up from his notepad, knotting his eyebrows together. He was back. I’ll be looking after you from now on, he’d said when we started. He’d given Geoff a look, as though to check if that was okay with him, and I’d nearly laughed.

‘I couldn’t find it either. They said—they said it happened sometimes. Hormones. But I knew it was there. I knew. I thought I was going to die before Ollie was even born, just keel over, and they’d cut me open and I’d be riddled with tumours.’ She straightened her fingers, still studying them. ‘And then I didn’t. But the feeling never went away. After he was born, they diagnosed me with post-natal depression. Put me on drugs. It didn’t help.’ She shrugged. ‘Nothing ever really has.’

Louise reached over and put her hand on Frannie’s shoulder.

‘It will be fine, Frannie,’ Donna said. She looked tired. They all looked so tired.

Frannie sat up, shaking her head. ‘I know. We’re going camping this weekend. The kids are so excited. Then I’ve got another appointment next week.’ She smiled, but she didn’t look happy.

‘You’ll be okay,’ Geoff said. He didn’t look happy either. I looked around the room. None of them did. Everybody looked … beige.

Frannie nodded. ‘I hope so. I’m just so tired.’

I closed my eyes. All these stories, over and over, and every time they ended the same way.

I hadn’t slept properly for weeks. I didn’t know how many. Some nights were better than others; if I worked hard enough, walked far enough, stayed out drinking for long enough, sleep slammed into me like a Mack truck on the freeway, dragged me along and left me groggy and sore and feeling hungover—or more hungover. Other nights it was nowhere to be seen, and it didn’t seem to matter what I did. I tried everything, but nothing worked.

It had never been this long before.

Tom came into work every few nights and we’d drink, talk. Mostly talk. About safe things, like politics and childhood holidays to the beach—his somehow exactly like mine, only in a holiday house instead of a caravan park—and meaningless chatter about the books he read while I worked. He liked crime novels, pulpy and gritty, liked how they pulled him out of a long shift at work, despite their darkness.

Sometimes I wanted to tell him. I looked at him and I almost believed I could, that it wouldn’t matter, but I couldn’t figure out how to start. Once he asked why I never worked Tuesdays and I told him some meaningless lie about a standing dinner engagementwith Lina, changed the subject, told him about the novel Nic had been writing for fifteen years.