I’d like to wait and argue with the librarian—all the librarians, if possible—but the return of my normal everyday self has brought with it the memory of why I left the house: to deliver Ethan’s gym bag to school. I should get on with it; I know he’ll worry until he has it in his hands.

Reluctantly, I slam my car door shut, pull out of the library parking lot and head for the Silsford Road. I can get to the school via Upper Heckencott, I think. It’s a ridiculously long-winded way of getting there, involving skinny, winding lanes that you have to reverse back along for about a mile if you meet a car coming in the opposite direction, but you generally don’t. And it’s the only route I can think of that doesn’t involve driving down Elmhirst Road.

I check my watch: 11:10 A.M. I pull my phone out of my bag, call the school, ask them to tell Ethan not to worry and that I’m on my way. All of this I do while driving, knowing I shouldn’t, hoping I’ll get away with it. I wonder if it’s possible, simultaneously, to be a good mother and a bad person: someone who enjoys picking fights with strangers in parking lots, who lies, who gets into trouble with the police and nearly ruins her life and the life of her family, who thinks, Fuck you, every time anyone points out what the rules are and that she’s breaking them.

I blow a long sigh out of the open window, as if I’m blowing out smoke. Ethan deserves a mother with no secrets, a mother who can drive to school without needing to hide from anyone. Instead, he has me. Soon he’ll have his gym bag too.

It could be worse for him. I’m determined to make it better, to make myself better.

Three weeks and four days. A verbal scrap with a self-righteous idiot doesn’t count as a lapse, I decide, at the same time as I tell myself that I mustn’t let it happen again—that I must be more humble in future, even if provoked. Less combative, more . . . ordinary. Like the other school mums. Though less dull than them, I hope. Never the sort of person who would say, “A home isn’t a home without a dog,” or, “I don’t know why I bother going to the gym—forty minutes on the treadmill and what do I do as soon as I get home? Raid the biscuit tin!”

As safe and honorable as those women, but more exciting. Is that possible?

I like to have it both ways; that’s my whole problem, in a nutshell.