It burned most in regard to Sarah. Of course you can’t force somebody to like you, you can’t force a person to care. And perhaps, to be fair, Sarah had simply recognised the oh-so-subtle dinner-party conversation for exactly what it was: a game of manipulation. In the aftermath, washing wine glasses at the kitchen sink, Veronica had regretted those childish digs. Despite the fleeting restoration of confidence they had imbued, despite the seductiveness of that, it wasn’t necessary, she’d told herself. She had plenty of friends now with whom there was a healthier dynamic, friends she had made in the years of enough-ness. That bitchy pre-teen wasn’t who she, now, wanted to be. Yet, for some reason, she couldn’t let Sarah go. And she couldn’t stop trying to taunt her, either into friendship or defeat. She’d ‘lost’ a homework that Amelia had clearly spent much time upon and requested she do it again. She’d chosen not to select Amelia, plainly one of the best, for that term’s chess team. She’d written all sorts of comments on Amelia’s work, hoping to provoke Sarah into coming in. All week she’d done everything she could think of to see her again, to reel her back, to make her want her, to prove, just as she had proven once before, that she, Veronica, wasn’t the one lacking and in need. The thought accompanied her as cotton flapped against itchy thighs. It accompanied her as she felt again nausea rising in her mouth. It was there as she breathed deeply in, and more deeply out, and held the air in her lungs in alternative waves of hope and envy.

The heat, however, that Friday, seemed to smother everything. At speed on her bike, Veronica weaved past the mosque on Regent’s Park Road and veered right. Pulling over in St John’s Wood High Street, she tried not to dwell on the pregnancy test she was buying from the pharmacy. She slipped it into her bag as though it was a pack of gum, as though all it might do was freshen her breath, and then jumped breezily back onto her bike, trying to ignore the poppy-seed-sized hope in her belly. But throughout the remainder of the journey to work, thoughts slipped through whirring spokes. She couldn’t stop them: images of herself taking the test into the staff toilets, wrapping the validating stick in tissue, trying to hide her elation until she could present it at the end of the day to George. She thought over and again about how delighted that would make him. She calculated how many weeks it would be until they could reveal that delight to the world. She envisaged which room they would use as a nursery and wondered how they might further soundproof it from the neighbours’ raves. She allowed herself to explore the imagined future in which two became three, lacking nothing.

In the furthest-most cubicle, her stomach churned. It was silly really, she had done this so many times before – waited for a few seconds of pee to pronounce her future. But on all those other occasions, she had already felt the answer somewhere inside of her, and thus prepared herself for disappointment. This time was different. This time she knew, knew it to be the opposite, and in readiness she unboxed the test and removed the stick from its plastic casing and held it at the ready.