That was our life then. Desperately holding on to our work, the flat, Cassie. I’d been a journalist to start out with, subbing at an interiors magazine, but then it folded, and the one I went to afterwards, a cookery title, folded too after six months. The magazine industry was imploding. At least law was booming. But in order to fuel that, it took so much of Mike. Not just his time, but his mind and body and spirit, until he was worn to a nub of a person. One night he came home around eleven. Early for him. He sat at the table in his suit, his tie crooked, and put his head in his hands. ‘I can’t do this,’ he said. ‘We can’t do this.’ I looked around at the kitchen table, where I’d been trying to send out freelance pitches in the middle of piles of laundry and dishes and Cassie’s school projects. The wall to her bedroom was so thin we could hear her breathing in her sleep. And the rent on the flat kept going up and up, despite its size and shabbiness.

‘Do you ever think we should move?’ Mike said, and I remember the strange feeling of relief that had burst inside me.

When I told Karen, something went over her face. At that time she lived fifteen minutes away, in a houseshare in Stamford Hill, where she somehow kept Jake fed with her job in a health-food shop. I didn’t understand why she had never tried to retake her degree – too proud, maybe. ‘You’re leaving? Then we won’t be nearby.’

Then, I thought she’d just miss me, and maybe she was annoyed we couldn’t share babysitting any more. Now I wondered was it something more – was she used to Mike being so close? Did she have feelings for him – had she wanted him all these years? I’d felt guilty, leaving her and Jake, a little boy I saw almost every day. But when we’d gone, and settled into our first house in Bishopsdean, a three-bed terrace near the station for Mike’s commute, didn’t I feel the relief again? Didn’t I feel I could somehow breathe? I’d thought it was London. But maybe it was her.

‘Mum.’ Cassie was staring at me like I was stupid. ‘You’ve missed the turn. You’ll have to go round again.’

We were late in the end, running for the courtroom after it took ten minutes to find a parking space. Bishopsdean was crammed with four-by-fours, yummy mummies off to coffee and baby yoga and the gym. I used to be one of those. Once we moved here I gave up trying to find any work in my ailing industry, and then I was busy with Benji, and when I emerged two years later I was a non-working mother with two children, just like the rest of Bishopsdean.