Mum looked stiff-faced, like I’d just slapped her, or like she was about to throw up. ‘Anna, I tried to –’

‘But I’m okay with that, Mum. And look at me – I’m alright. I’m going to be alright. And it is what it is. I just don’t want to do any pretending. Okay?’

Mum finally nodded. ‘That seems reasonable, Anna. I’ll try not to expect you to forget.’

‘Dad does it too. Expects me to forget.’

It was a while before Mum spoke again. She watched the road, her lips tight. Eventually she said, ‘Yep. It’s a hard thing to swallow, not being good enough for the ones you love.’

I could see that. How hard that would be. And I could imagine myself in that position. In the near future, in fact, if I let it happen. Unwilling, and perhaps unable, to be who I was supposed to be as a parent; absent in a relationship that was supposed to be all about love. That would be so unfair. So unfair to everyone, but mostly to the one who’d had no ability to choose. The muddy water of my thoughts ran suddenly clear, clear and clean and obvious and right.

One day a child would be born. And I would love it to bits with all of me, with everything I had to give. One day.

We’d been driving in silence, each lost in our own thoughts. But then Mum suddenly piped up. ‘I guess that’s why I’m so invested in my business.’ I thought she must have been thinking about the way she used her business to avoid any emotional interpersonal responsibility, but she surprised me with what she went on to say. ‘Because there I get to do some good in a way I can’t stuff up. I can help some people who really need it, provide some real physical and emotional support, without dragging my own baggage into the picture to bugger it all up. It satisfies that itch, you know?’

‘IT is emotional?’ I’d said it before thinking, and I felt instantly regretful about my scoffing tone. But my mother gave me a strange look: not hurt, but bemused. I was missing something. ‘When you say support, you mean tech support, right? Wait, I’m confused.’

‘You know what my business does, right?’

‘Of course I do. You build programs and platformy things for people to create partnerships. Data. Integration. Strategic synergy thingammyjigs. For the betterment of streamlining something. Health care. Health insurance. Something to do with health.’

‘You don’t know what we do.’

‘I do so! That’s what you do, right? Build platforms for partnerships?’

‘Well, yes –’

‘See!’

‘– but maybe you don’t know what they’re for.’

‘Health . . . something. Well, I don’t think you’ve told me,’ I said defensively.

‘Well, I don’t think you’ve listened. It’s won awards and everything –’

‘I know that! Isn’t it all just algorithms and investors and weird coding languages like Javanese and Sequin and Blocklink and –’