Still, there had always been a certain patchwork element to Veronica’s recollections. Sometimes she put this down to the piecemeal chronology of her childhood and whenever she was asked about her youth, it was in this fashion that she deliberately rolled the quilt out for the listener: here was her flat in Holland, there was the market in Oman, here the New York subway, there the handsy English teacher. Described this way, she sounded worldly and exotic. But the threads that held this variety of pieces together were darned hastily and sometimes they seemed to split inside her. She couldn’t gather them or hold them all at once. She couldn’t order them or pull from them a sense of progression. She could barely even locate herself within them. And so they slipped, untethered threads.

Why did Sarah hate her?

Veronica took a long gulp of her wine and looked out to the street, as though solidity lay somewhere in the lamp-lit throws of prettily painted Primrose. Her mind spun. She had to still it. It had been many years since she’d felt this out of control, and she had to regain it. She’d grown up now. She didn’t want to pilfer. The thought of what she’d been doing to Amelia was sickening.

But resentment burned in the empty space where a baby should be.

No. She’d been enough, once. She had to remember that. She’d been enough, without a baby, without Sarah, just as she was. Of all the misshapen, untied, jumbled memories, that’s what she had to remember and cling on to. She’d been wrong to return to pilfering, wrong to taunt her old friend, wrong to go to the museum, wrong to use Amelia. There was no need to tear at the hem of Sarah’s life just to darn her own. It was far better to be mending, patching, fixing.

She would lay off Amelia. It wasn’t necessary to explain, she would simply find an excuse not to have the meeting.

She would lay off Sarah too – not force the friendship, not force herself to confront her envy.

She would busy herself – with other friends, with her husband, with their new home. Except of course, that as soon as she glanced again to the street and considered their perfect, pastel dwelling, she remembered that, unlike Sarah, she had no family to fill it.

Then, a face appeared at her window.

It was wrong to feel so unnerved by the sight of an eleven-year-old. Veronica realised this at once and was reprimanding herself for it before the thought was even fully formed. But the intensity of Dominic’s beady, too-close eyes had a way of disquieting her even on the street in daylight; and this time, it was not day but night, and he was not innocuous on a public street, but peering through her window, at her. As soon as he saw her see him, he backed away a little, squirreling again, but as he did so she noticed a towel wrapped around his hand, darkened by something she could only presume was blood.