‘Yeah, two boys. What about you?’ he asked.

She paused. ‘Just one. A girl. Abigail.’

Just for a moment she wanted to be like a normal person.

‘Lovely name,’ he said. She looked at him and nodded. Yes, it was a lovely name. ‘How old is she?’

‘Nine,’ she said. It was as if Emma was watching the conversation from one of those speeding clouds up there.

Afterwards she sat in the car for a long time without moving, staring at the steering wheel. Why aren’t the streets full of wrecked people?

* * *

It wasn’t until the parking attendant tapped on her window that she came out of her reverie and started the engine. The cheery Australian voice, impervious to loss, took her by surprise.

‘Rerouting.’

Yes, she thought, rerouting. She looked at her phone, noticing that her battery was about to die. It was eleven. Still no response to her messages. She would make it a brief visit.

Emma parked up in Allinson Road, as near to number five as she could. It was a gentrified Victorian terraced street. She had once hoped that she would live somewhere like this, where blonde women pushed prams, kids left unlocked bikes outside jolly coloured doors that were left open, window boxes bloomed, bins lived in painted kennels nestled beside olive trees wafting in lavender, and neighbours popped in to arrange dinner parties, postmen whistled and left packages next door. Bad things don’t happen in places like this.

Oh Connie, how did you let it all go so wrong?

She watched the road in her wing mirror: muddy boys in soccer gear climbed out of a four-by-four. Two girls whizzed round the corner on skateboards in tutus, followed by a woman with neatly messy hair being tugged by one of those non-moulting poodles on a lead, a small boy bouncing a ball behind her. Emma watched them go. She had always wanted that: to be part of a busy, bustling family, like the one Si had come from. That had been a strong part of her attraction to him – his family: the noise, the jostling, the jibes and the effortless love.

Her own mother’s love had always felt conditional – on Emma making her mother feel good, on Emma being clever (like her), on Emma being thin (like her). And it had just been the two of them for most of the time. It wasn’t until she was older, when she was an undergraduate and had come across the personality of a narcissist in her studies, that she had begun to make sense of her mother. When Emma had failed to get pregnant, her mother would constantly remind her how easily she herself had got pregnant, keen to remove herself from Emma’s failings as a woman. And so it had transpired that all those years of taking contraception and morning-after pills had been for nothing, because Emma’s body (‘such child-bearing hips’, ‘such a maternal bosom’) wasn’t up to it. And what joy, what extreme happiness for her and Si, when the second round of IVF had worked. And so the blow had felt even harsher when it came.