‘Shall we sit outside?’ asked Rav, pushing the sliding doors open so that the kitchen and garden became one long room. Chloe winced, knowing that once they got outside Rav would light a cigarette – downwind of the baby, but in the same postcode, which would make Lissy furious. Lissy would stew all evening then finally snap and say something before she and Guy went home. She beckoned Rav into the kitchen and told him not to smoke around the baby, at least not until Lissy had finished her first glass of wine. Leaving Guy and Lissy fussing over their sleeping daughter, she started to chop an avocado for the salad.

‘Hey’ – Rav caught her arm as she closed the fridge – ‘you didn’t mean that before, about the bird thing?’

‘What bird thing?’

‘Having a bird and loads of cash and no kids.’

‘Oh.’ Chloe fixed her face into a smile. What a time to ask. ‘Of course not.’

Relief flushed on Rav’s perfect face. ‘Phew.’

Chloe forced a laugh. ‘Can you imagine? What would you do?’

Rav laughed. ‘God knows. Come outside.’

‘I’ll be out in a minute – just let me put the fish in.’

As expected, Guy and Rav spent half an hour on cricket then another on rugby, or rather the upcoming rugby season, while Lissy recounted every moment of her birth, including a ten-minute monologue on how the midwife had said she was the ‘best prepared’ mother she’d ever delivered. Chloe smiled and nodded in all the right places, and tried to ignore the pang of sadness in the back of her chest at the knowledge that Lissy was lost to her, probably until she herself had children. It had happened slowly, over the course of the pregnancy. The questions ‘And what have you been up to?’ or ‘And how are you?’ seemed to have been subsumed by the growing life inside her. By the time baby Claudia was born, Lissy’s ability to ask a single question about Chloe’s life had completely disappeared. Lissy had been the longest holdout of Chloe’s friends, but it had been inevitable.