Everything is ready: books, piles of paper, the pencils for each child, and the name tags in bright blue ink: Poppy, Isabelle, Blake. She glances at the certificates hanging by the sink: EVE PEMBERTON, BA (HONS) IN PRIMARY EDUCATION; the smaller certificate means more, the diploma in teaching learners with dyslexia, the course she did online this year, for Poppy.

Eric comes into the kitchen; he reaches for a croissant, which disappears in a couple of bites. “Nervous?”

She pushes the lines of pencils on the table together until they meet with a little click. “A bit.”

“I hope it’s worth it.” He kisses her, the stubble scraping her cheek, and smooths a strand of hair behind her ear. “You don’t have to put yourself through this; school will sort Poppy, given time.”

She shakes her head and moves away, sliding the kettle onto the stove. “Time isn’t on Poppy’s side. If you feel stupid, every day, every minute matters. I have to try for her sake. It might seem a little crazy but—”

“You must do what your heart tells you to.” It’s a favorite expression of his and it usually helps. He smiles at her; he’s hardly changed since they met twelve years ago, back when the garden was still her father’s and he was shaping beds and planting trees. His eyes are the same sky blue as they were that hot morning in June, the week before her finals. She’d been lying on a blanket in her bikini making notes. Her parents’ cocktail party was in full swing on the sundrenched veranda above; the babble of chatter and chink of glasses reached her hiding place behind a bed of roses. She could hear her mother calling her, thinly disguised impatience in that well-bred voice. Eric had almost stepped on her.

“Now there’s a coincidence,” he’d said, as he lowered the wheelbarrow. “I hate parties too.”

When her parents died and it came to choosing, her brother chose the shares, the cars and the yacht, the racehorses. She’d wanted space. The villa among the olive trees in Greece, and the house where she’d grown up, this very house with its two acres of planted land between the road and the railway. The chance to be barefoot in a kitchen with children in the garden, running in and running out. Her mother had been too busy for her, too occupied with friends and parties. Eve’s kids would have a normal childhood, though as Eric pointed out, it wasn’t normal at all. Most mothers had a job nowadays; if you wanted normal you had to model it. Well, now she was.

Privately she wonders if Poppy inherited her dyslexia from Eric; he had talked late, and says little still. Her father had liked his silences, finding them restful. The old man had walked with him in the garden each evening, sipping wine, gesturing with his pipe to the wood, the planted slopes, the wildlife pond in the paddock where his donkeys lived. He’d put his arm around the young landscaper’s shoulders, growing expansive with drink. All the same, when Eric asked for Eve’s hand after three short months, her father was cautious. He advised her to wait, but Eric had been what she wanted, she had been quite sure. She’d wanted peace back then, not words; a kind man, a garden, children.