“Actually, my husband will be picking up tomorrow,” Sarah replied as she enveloped Amelia in a comfortable hug. “David usually does the pick-up, but Mondays are my day.”

“Oh? What do you do then?” Veronica queried, feeling herself inexplicably prickling, her unease returning, as though Sarah’s failure to show up on the school run was somehow a rejection of her.

“I’m a lawyer.”

“Oh. Right. Unsurprising.”

“Really? Why?”

“Well you always liked rules, didn’t you?”

The same mother who had laughed earlier, laughed again, and Veronica smiled at her, enjoying the fleeting sense of command, wondering where the slight barbs in her speech were coming from. Sarah furrowed her brow. She did this the same way Amelia did, the same way, Veronica now remembered, she always used to. Sarah began to usher Amelia away from the door to make room for the next parent, but Veronica touched her arm again. “Dinner then. This week. I’ll get your number from the office.”

Sarah smiled and nodded agreeably, though, Veronica noticed, it was with not quite total enthusiasm, as she shepherded her daughter away.

Veronica didn’t leave the school campus until well after five o’clock. Ordinarily, she supposed, she could be gone by four, but she’d had a short meeting with the headmaster to debrief about her first day, and besides, wanted some time to explore the classroom alone. On the wall hung photographs of each of her new Year 2s, and she tried to put names to faces. Managing sixteen out of twenty, she lingered for a moment on Amelia’s, and then spent a few minutes memorising the four that had eluded her. Names learned, she walked slowly around the room, looking at each of the pieces of work on the wall, noting which children had exceptionally neat handwriting, and which seemed in need of development. She stood for an especially long time in front of the collage of self-portraits, attempting to see past the precision of paint, or lack of it, and through to the more important clues of self-perception. On the cycle home she pondered further the enigma of one very pale-skinned boy painting himself a deep brown, the oddity of one face that had been fashioned as almost entirely mouth, and Amelia’s creation, which included every freckle, every red curl, and a meticulously accurate depiction of both shape and colour of the eyes and mouth, revealing that the girl saw herself almost exactly as she was, and suggested she was just as straight-shooting as her mother.

Veronica was still thinking about this when she saw him – the boy from next door. She was mid locking up her bike, carefully threading the cord through both railing and wheel, when something in her periphery caught her attention and she looked up to see him standing on the other side of the street, looking at her. He had not yet crossed over, and she watched as he pretended to notice something of interest on the pavement. Veronica lingered. Even in the day’s flurry of new pupils, and new parents, and then the surprise of Sarah, the noises of the previous night had not stopped echoing in her mind, scratching just below the surface, like the itch beneath her skin. More than once that day she had thought about the uneasiness of this boy. More than once she had thought about the baby crying. More than once she had wondered whether the woman was okay. Just once, her father’s friend in Oman had intruded again into her mind…