‘It drove Leonie crazy, that her own sister wasn’t a feminist. We thought we could change everything. We didn’t understand why all women wouldn’t get on board. Not just women like Ursula. We had no idea of how privileged we were. Women working two jobs can’t come on marches. Single parents can’t always afford babysitters so they can come to meetings. Women who weren’t white might not have wanted to be the only different face. We made a lot of assumptions. And we definitely didn’t see what a long road we were on. We didn’t imagine we would ever end up with people like you.’

She doesn’t say it like an insult, but Erica feels it as one. She thinks of the ‘Doctor’ title she doesn’t insist on, the fact that she is the one with babysitters’ numbers in her phone. She would apologise, if she didn’t know that Vee would tell her off for it.

Vee picks up her cup and sets it carefully in the centre of the saucer. ‘I miss Leonie,’ she says quietly, and she looks straight at Erica, as if to tell her that she knows what she is saying, that she is breaking her own rule by offering to talk about her friend like this.

‘I don’t remember much about her.’ Erica speaks quietly, too, as though loudness might scare Vee away from this conversation. Oh, how she longs to know what really happened, on the day Leonie died.

‘She really wasn’t part of your life?’

‘Not really. She and my mother argued a lot. My mother said that for someone who had no maternal instinct, she definitely had a lot of advice for her about all the ways that she was going wrong.’

Vee laughs, a sudden, sweet sound. ‘Leonie was never afraid of having opinions.’

‘I never used to understand why my mother got so annoyed with her. I do now.’ Erica thinks of her mother-in-law’s interventions, kindly meant, no doubt, and how they make her both furious and desolate with the loss of her own mother, over and over.

Vee looks straight at her again, and Erica feels as though her photograph is being taken, her image held, just by the older woman’s gaze. The cafe around them gets louder. Erica is as self-conscious as she would be if she was actually being photographed. She sips at her coffee, for something to do, although she doesn’t want the rest of it; it’s got too cold and there’s a bitterness in the flavour that doesn’t taste quite right to her.

‘You know people thought you had died? Or committed suicide?’ she says, because she has often thought about this, and there might never be a better time to mention it. ‘After the photograph of Leonie’s death was published, I mean, and it all came out.’