In the intervening twenty-odd years, there had been only two other periods in which she’d felt the same illusive contentment of that February. Not to say that she hadn’t felt joy; there had been plenty of moments that had thrilled and pleased and satisfied. But those emotions bounced around unchained and unreliable, drifting off at their whim, and very often they were accompanied by other feelings: desire, hollowness, longing, envy. What Veronica identified aged nine that February was different: a sense of everything being just, perfectly, enough.

The longest and most significant of the two other occasions, was during her first few years with George. They had met in Nairobi where for almost a year she had been teaching in a neighbourhood school. George was there for just a few days as part of a more expansive Kenyan safari, but one evening they’d found themselves entangled in wine and debate at a party thrown by a mutual expat friend named Hugo. Hugo was not only a colleague at the school where Veronica taught, but he was the reason she taught there, or taught at all. Like George, she had begun her own journey in Kenya on a holiday – a one-month break from her job in celebrity PR, a role at which she was exceedingly good, and most days left her with the same conviction she had harboured throughout her childhood – that something was stubbornly, relentlessly, missing. Hugo was joking really when he suggested she try teaching. But when Veronica visited the school in one of Nairobi’s slums, when she met the children, and saw the look on Hugo’s face when he interacted with them, she knew immediately that that was it, that candid joy – she wanted that delight for herself. And so she began to teach.

If it hadn’t been for meeting George, she probably would never have left Kenya. She thought about that sometimes, more lately, and wondered if she’d made the right choice. But when George had looked at her that first night, he seemed to see her, to know her. And after he extended his trip and they spent almost two weeks together under the sticky Kenyan sun, she found that she still both wanted him and felt wanted by him, yet, astonishingly, was not in control of him, nor controlled by him, and thus, in possession of such rare, mythical grounding and balance, agreed to follow him home.

There ensued the search for a flat they could share; the greedy immersion into each other’s circles of friends; and they spent long hours dissecting their childhoods with an honesty that startled and thrilled them, measuring their own experiences against the other, both finding providence in moments of symmetry. Throughout this sustained flurry of early exploration, then later commitment, engagement, marriage, Veronica knew that things with George were different from any relationship she’d had previously. She felt not so much his presence, but, simply, an unaccustomed lack of lack. As though he was the illusive piece that had always been missing.