Veronica’s arms felt awkward as she stood in front of him. Her legs too, itching horrendously. It was as though she’d forgotten how to stand normally, and now gangly, misshapen limbs made best attempts but fooled nobody. The idiocy of it maddened her. The unnecessary meeting. The weak unsteadiness. This wasn’t her. The Veronica of old would have effortlessly manoeuvred this conversation into easy repartee, she would have had him eating out of her hand. The Veronica that Sarah had known would, at the very least, have faked confidence. Now, all she seemed able to do, was nothing. She listed her failings. So far that week she had: failed to get her own husband to desire her, failed to knock on the door of a woman who was possibly in danger or alert any authority to it, failed to talk comfortably to an eleven-year-old boy, and now she couldn’t even speak to a parent with elegance. “I was just touched by it,” she hurried. “And I’ve been trying to find a moment to chat to each parent this week, and I thought it something that you, and Sarah of course, would like to know. How is Sarah?” Veronica listened to her stream of seemingly rambling inquiries as though it wasn’t her speaking them, as though she was only just now, impartially, observing the direction the conversation was about to take. But as she listened it dawned on her: of course there had been a reason for the meeting, of course, and of course it had never been about Amelia.

“Oh,” said David. “Okay. Well thank you, yes, it’s always nice to hear good things.” His little boy toddled back over to him and David bounced him on his foot. “Sarah’s, fine. Busy as ever.”

“We’re trying to arrange a dinner; did she tell you?” Veronica pressed with a little more ease. “For some non-school-oriented conversation. It’s been such a long time. I think she just needed to check your schedule actually. Do you have your diary on you?”

David lifted his son into his arms, planting another kiss onto his squidgy cheek, and took his phone out of his pocket. “Oh, she didn’t mention. But sure.”

Veronica went to her handbag for her own phone. “Sorry, I hope it’s not inappropriate to do this at school. It’s just that I know Sarah’s always at work so it’s easier when we’re both right here, isn’t it? How’s next Tuesday? Or Friday? Come to ours.”

“Thursday’s good,” said David, naively, typing the arrangement into his phone.

As he typed, Veronica felt her spine straightening. “Lovely,” she smiled. And inhaled deeply. Breath came tinged with June humidity, warmth lapping with giggles from the playground. Balmy air tickled her nostrils. Suddenly, however, all Veronica could smell, was February.

One February in particular. It cleaved like fresh wallpaper, giving off that new room aroma, cleaning the space where it sat in her memory with immaculate, unsullied lines. She was nine. Veronica’s father was between postings – after Holland, before Belgium. She was ‘between’ too; transferring after half term to the alternative primary school in Brussels. In the meantime, they had taken a chalet with another family in the Swiss Alps. There were two children: one, a boy a year younger than herself, and his sister four years older. Having never had but always longed for siblings, Veronica responded to the admiration of the younger and the sophistication of the older with equal pleasure, and she spent the next weeks locked in the fantasy of an extended family who lived in a cabin on a snow-coated mountainside, and whose parents never worked but guided them off-piste and made them hot chocolate, and were still there in the evening when the lights were out and their wine-tipped voices reverberated pleasantly through the wooden rooms, and lulled her to sleep.