If Lissy had found the request to come to the graveyard strange, she hadn’t said so. In fact, she had been brilliant in almost every way over the last year. From the moment Chloe had stood on the doorstep, sobbing, Lissy had been there, just as she always had been, calmly unbothered. Chloe had stayed with them for several weeks after the Revelation, as she had taken to thinking of it. She and Lissy had sat up night after night, Lissy breastfeeding an apparently endlessly starving baby, Chloe weeping, obsessing, questioning what she should do. Lissy had offered very little advice, realizing, as friends so rarely do, that Chloe didn’t need direction but time. She offered no judgement when Chloe said she wanted to stay with Rav, no judgement when she said she wanted to leave. She helped make lists, do sums. Asked all of the questions that have to be asked.

It had been too late for the kind of abortion that Chloe felt comfortable with. And anyway, she was nearly thirty-six. It was probably now or never. And as she looked down at Rose, she struggled to stir up any guilt from inside herself at having brought her into the world. She was too perfect to regret.

Rav’s mother had been, to Chloe’s immense surprise, generous and kind. ‘I told you I would buy you a house if you had a child,’ she had written in her now weekly email. ‘And I meant it. It will be up to you whether or not Ravinder lives with you both. But my grandchild must have a home.’

So she had purchased a little two-bedroom with a tiny garden, a mile away. Close enough that she could walk to Lissy and Guy’s house, come rain or shine, but far enough that she never had to walk past her old flat again.

There were strict rules about what could be left on graves. Zadie’s mother had instructed her not to bring all sorts of extraordinary things, like teddy bears, for example. Chloe had tried not to be offended that it seemed plausible she might bring such a thing.

She had also answered Chloe’s questions. It had felt selfish to ask her about Zadie, about the fifteen years that had passed between the party and the day that Zadie had died. She had heard herself ask Astrid to talk about her and, to her great relief, it seemed Astrid wanted to. The words had come spilling out, story after story about Zadie and her attempts to wrestle with life, to be a person in the same way that everyone around her had found so easy to be.