‘You’ve got money,’ she says.

‘I’ve got enough.’

After six weeks in the Haarlem apartment, Claire is dismayed by the state of her own flat. The piles of boxes no longer pass for furniture. Pink mould blooms on the bathroom wall. She crawls into bed but she can’t fall asleep. Is this what it’s like to be Patience – never off, always on? Or her mother, even? Her mother hardly sleeps, she likes to claim. There’s no relief for either of them, she thinks. No relief from being what they are.

The money, too, keeps biting into her thoughts. Where did it come from? And when? If her mother’s had it since the divorce, then she had it the whole time Claire was saving for the PhD. She remembers all the discouraging comments, the swipes at the ivory tower; she remembers her mother totting up what was owed. It can’t be that. It has to be more recent. But her mother doesn’t have any friends any more, no relatives to speak of. How has she come across it? And this is the little glowing seed in it all, the bit Claire wants to hold on to, because the only person she can think of is Ross. Ross making all that money in Hong Kong. Getting older, finally. Sending something home.

Patience would know. Claire could ask her, and she’d tell the truth. But if Claire asked, she would have to hear the answer. She lets this prospect drift, and instead imagines writing a letter. It would have to be a real letter: Ross is too high up in the company for his email address to be public. She would thank him for the money. She would say that it enabled her mother to secure a synthetic carer who is making her life, and Claire’s, much easier now. She would tell him she has recently undertaken a fellowship in Europe that would not have been possible without his generosity. She would show him he’d been wrong – she wasn’t trapped. If the money was his, he’d be flattered; if not, he might be embarrassed into reaching out and correcting the mistake. She falls asleep drafting the letter in her mind, and dreams of Ross in the bus station holding a bouquet of yellow balloons.