Bea tiptoed out of the house while the sun was still hidden by haze and walked to the station, the streets she’d walked every day in childhood. The morning was chilly. She was sore from the sex the day before, she felt it when she walked. She remembered the feel of him in her arms, and how soft his neck was against her face, the velvet roughness of the back of his head, where his hair started, and his lips pressed softly on her collarbone. She thought of throwing away her birth control pills, and what it would be like to feel him come inside her, knowing they could make a baby. They could have a baby in a house. It was miraculous. They’d be a family. She tried to believe that he loved her, but she couldn’t believe it. She could only think he’d wanted her so badly because of the money, that he’d been fucking her money, and doing it quickly, feeling passionately about her body because of that. She remembered she’d read somewhere you shouldn’t flush your birth control pills away, because of the hormones in the water. She wondered what they would call their child. She would like a girl, so she could give a girl unending, easy love, and never have her daughter feel like she had felt. A boy might make her think of her mother. She mustn’t be frightened of that. Her mother was nothing to do with her. And Dan might want a son. She didn’t care if it was a boy or a girl. A baby was a baby. A baby and Dan. She pushed the other thoughts away. It was vain to worry about how much she was loved all the time. She must try not to be so vain.

She took the train to Holloway, as if she were starting a good working day. Dust-spattered windows, chimneystacks, as if the last two weeks had not happened. For a moment, on the train, Alex wasn’t dead, and she and Dan were like they had been. No death. No Griff and Liv. No greed, forcing itself into the cracks. Just coming home from work, eating dinner, going out. Normal. She changed at King’s Cross, immensely relieved to be back in crowds where each person looked different, away from the tasteful narrowness of France. Joining the fast-moving people, she caught the Piccadilly line to Holloway Road, and went out into the exhaust-fume, take-away smell of home. She felt like a ghost, or that Paligny was the ghost. When you’re gone, and you look back, this will feel like a dream, Now he had gone, everything was; life caught between a dream and a nightmare.

The building works above the practice had hardly moved on; the scaffolding was sunbaked now, not dripping. She ran down the basement steps.

‘Bea! Oh my God! What the hell are you doing here?’