I could be your rockstar wife, I thought bitterly. Still stinging that Ben hadn’t brought up our tricky conversation in weeks now. Jessica was looking at us with somewhat dewy-eyed admiration.

“This is so cool, I feel like a groupie,” she said when Ben and I broke apart. “My friend is proper famous.”

“I’m not sure about that.”

Mum still had her pinched face on, and kept glancing at her silver wristwatch, twitchy about the trains back to St. Albans. Dad put his hand on her shoulder. “No Heather tonight?” he asked. She was his favorite of all my friends, and he asked after her constantly. She came to visit the first summer after uni and spent the whole evening telling us what a “female chauvinist pig” was with drunken gusto. Dad was totally charmed and could never mention her without saying what a good influence she was.

“She’s got dragged into another late shift.” I put my hands above my head to stretch. “Plus she’s not a fan of mental health books. She says Dr. Petra should use her million-pound book advance to invest in preemptive mental health care, or something like that.”

Mum’s finger pointed to the air. “I must say,” she said, her words tumbling out quickly, as if she’d been desperate to get this out. “Some of the stuff she was saying was a bit...unfair on parents. I wasn’t impressed.”

I kept my face blank. Unsurprised.

“I mean, it was all a bit Philip Larkin. Interesting she’s not a mother herself, isn’t it?”

“How do you know she isn’t a mother?”

“I just googled it on my phone.”

Ben reached over and squeezed my shoulder, all, I know, I know. We’d spoken so often about my mother. Me gradually telling him some of my darker memories of her. Of being left to cry alone because she couldn’t handle it, how she’d put in earplugs and keep working through it.

“...I’m just saying, all of these things about ‘what parents should do’ are great in theory, but, unless you’ve actually been a parent yourself, it’s not the wisest plan to cast stones. Anyway, there, I’ve said it, I’ve said my piece.”

Jessica had her head tilted, nodding at my mother. “You’re totally right,” she said. “That’s what I kept thinking. Oh my God, the amount of unsolicited advice I get from people who aren’t parents themselves. It drives me nuts!”

They glowed at one another with a shared conspiracy, and that’s when I noticed Jessica hadn’t bought a copy of Dr. Petra’s book from the stand. I’d wondered sometimes if it had ever occurred to Jessica to go to therapy, but she appeared to share my mother’s defensive mechanisms.