Once Angie and Jack got back from holiday, they’d got into an unspoken habit of meeting up in the garden at weekends. Someone would inevitably light a barbecue or bring out some snacks. While the children played the adults sat around chatting, often for entire afternoons. She and Angie would stay out long after Alan and Jack had drifted back inside.

The previous weekend they’d ended up chatting in the garden until midnight. They had sat side by side in reclining chairs, a bottle of wine between them and the scent of jasmine lingering in the air. Angie was great fun although she was still a closed book when it came to talking about herself. She never gave anything personal away but she was surprisingly easy to talk to.

They discussed Sophie’s career, or lack of it, and Angie was the only person other than Alan who knew the full extent of her never-ending writer’s block. It had been a relief to finally be honest with someone. They talked about parenting too, its challenges, its rewards. As mothers they couldn’t be more different. Sophie knew she hovered around Tom and Katie like a hummingbird whereas Angie was more hands off, telling her that she and Jack believed in giving their children the freedom to make mistakes and be who they wanted to be.

There was no doubt that the Taylor children were confident and felt free to follow their own paths. She’d noticed it particularly with Benji, the eldest. He hated studying, loathed sport and was only happy when he was at drama class or rehearsing for a play. She thought that someone as successful and motivated as Angie would be pushing him to do well academically. Or perhaps Jack would be disappointed that his oldest son didn’t like football. But they didn’t seem to care.

‘He’s only got to scrape through his GCSEs and then he can go to drama school,’ Jack had said one evening, when they were having dinner together.

‘You don’t mind if he doesn’t do his A-levels?’ Sophie had asked, intrigued.

‘Christ no, Benji would hate that. The quicker we get him out of that place and into a performing arts school the better.’

Sophie had turned to Angie, curious to see her response, but she had nodded in agreement. She was too embarrassed to confess that she had already started contacting tutors for Tom, in the hope that he might get through the eleven-plus exams and secure a place at a grammar school. As a teenager herself, she had loved drama but her parents had refused to let her go to performing arts school. She had diligently stayed on for her A-levels and then gone to journalism college, putting all thoughts of Broadway behind her. She thought now how lucky Benji was to have such supportive parents, who made it so easy for him to pursue his dream.

In contrast, she found herself worrying about how much she hovered around Tom and Katie, fretting about whether they were fitting in at school, what marks they got in their spelling tests, whether they’d do well in their SATs, whose sleepover they hadn’t been invited to. When she had voiced her fears to Angie, though, she had dismissed them as though they were nothing.