‘Yeah,’ Vee says. When she’s upset or under stress, her Essex accent comes out, and it reminds Leonie of when she first met her, with her skirt and her heels and her forelock-tugging, ‘am I allowed’ attitude. She’s come a long way, that’s for sure. ‘I just . . .’ She raises her hands, drops them. ‘I didn’t think you were as upset as you were. It didn’t – it didn’t fit with what I knew about you. When I saw you in the pub that day—’ she pauses, a question.

‘I remember,’ Leonie says. Vee reacted to the offer of the kid like it was nothing. She must have realised that Leonie meant it, but she just shrugged it off, like Leonie was trying to give her some old shirt she knew she would never wear. It had seemed like a good option – Vee must be loaded these days, and she was never really as cool with rejecting the conventional as she makes out. There was another life where she would have married some Essex welder and had a girl and a boy, and named the girl after her mother and the boy after his father. Leonie had thought that a kid might appeal to that part of her. But no, Vee had turned her down without blinking. She’d made more of a drama when her fucking darkroom door was opened that time.

Ursula, on the other hand, made it some kind of honour, with the tears and the ‘are you sure’s and the ‘we’ll never be able to thank you enough’s. Funny how fast that got forgotten, too, and Aunt Leonie became an interfering pain who had no idea how hard it was to be a real parent. Well, that might be true, but Leonie is pretty fucking sure that it’s not that hard to buy clothes for girls that aren’t pink, and give them Lego as well as dolls. But Ursula and Alec are doing their thing, and Leonie has to let them get on with it. She doesn’t think she really cares about Erica, except in the way that she cares about all of the children – abstractedly, because they matter, as part of the fight. Everything will get fixed a lot faster if kids learn that they are the same, from the beginning. It’s so bloody obvious, but nobody gets it. Not properly. Even the ones who are trying to raise their kids equally walk round like they need a medal for it.