“We’ll run all the tests anyway,” said Dr Shirazi, as though sensing her hesitation. “Your scan was fine, all normal. Pop across the road on your way out and we’ll take the bloods. Then we’ll have all the information. It’ll take a few days for the results.”

“Okay,” she agreed, thankful for this sturdier, more medical ground.

“And in the meantime,” he winked. “Try to scratch that itch. You might even want to talk to it, find out what it wants, give it a name.”

Now Veronica couldn’t help but raise her eyebrows once more – her legs itched at that very moment, physical, real. He wanted her to name it? The man was clearly deranged. Still, she couldn’t resist the warmth in his eyes and as she stood up, conceded to a sceptical smile.

“May I hug you?” he asked as they reached the door.

She smiled again, almost laughing at the absurdity of it all, but, as his arms wrapped around her shoulders, firm and engulfing, and not straying anywhere they shouldn’t, the tears that had been threatening earlier saw their chance for escape. Within a minute, the doctor’s shoulder was flooded. Coincidentally, the itching stopped.

The clinic was nestled in a converted church in a leafy crescent of St John’s Wood. It was only a few streets away from the school where Veronica worked and was today absent, so she cycled quickly. Name the itch. Name the itch. What a ridiculous suggestion. What should she name it? Immediately, names tumbled through her mind – Rosie, Matilda, Sophia, Oliver, William – names that she realised at once had been on her premature list for the never-meant-to-be baby. As she pedalled, the names rolled like noisy spokes around her mind and the subdued itch began to start up again as though demanding a decision, so she settled on Rosie. Rosie clearly wanted her attention. Rosie was incessant. Rosie was consuming and infuriating. Perhaps she did want to be ‘named’ after all, acknowledged, talked about, released.

Veronica knew that already. She hadn’t needed Dr Shirazi to tell her that she and George needed to talk about the miscarriage, the baby, the absence of it. She had longed for that communication, she had longed for them to unload like they used to, to tell each other how sad and disappointed and thwarted and exposed and powerless and guilty and vulnerable they felt. But it had been easier to believe in the freshness of the house. It had been easier, in the move, to pack her problems with their belongings in carefully sealed boxes.

Only, boxes need unpacking eventually.

The neighbours were a beginning. One problem at a time. One box. One memory. One fear, one confession.

Coming to a stop next to a bike rack, Veronica locked the frame of her bicycle to the street-side metal bar, and scratched the itch.

She had no idea where she was. The maps app on her phone had directed her back through Primrose Hill, past Chalk Farm and to what seemed to be a housing estate somewhere in Kentish Town. Supposedly, this was where Primrose Hill’s social housing offices were located, but she’d been imagining an official-looking building on a main street, not a maze of difficult to distinguish towers. In the morning’s spirit of boldness, she’d told George she would meet him there, but in hindsight she should have waited in St John’s Wood and shared an Uber. On the corner of the estate, a group of teenage boys gathered, hooded despite the summer heat. They hadn’t seemed to notice her yet, but there was something forceful and threatening about their sheer multitude and youth. It was probable, she realised, that the boys were simply spilling out of school, loitering here for a game of football, but she left her bike and walked quickly away from the estate, round the corner, and out onto the main road. She was half an hour early anyway, she told herself, why not grab a coffee and get George to meet her at a café?