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“Yes, soon I’ll have to…” Antoinette trailed off modestly as she gestured toward an open copy of The Gentlewoman , where, above a profile of herself as a groundbreaking creative director, she’d been pictured wearing Look 3 from Céline’s 2015 ready-to-wear collection months before it became available to the public.

“Oh yes, you have to,” Coralie said.

“And what can I do for you?”

“I think I have to leave early today. To pick up Zora from school? But Stefan has everything he needs.”

Antoinette put her pen between two pages of her notebook and gently closed it. “How’s the renovation?”

“Good, I’m about to do the lighting plan.”

“Light switches ninety centimeters above the floor,” Antoinette said. “Any higher, they interfere with the hang.”

“The hang…of what?”

“The picture hang? When the art goes up.”

“Ah,” Coralie said. “Of course.”

“And by the way.”

Coralie poked her head back round the door.

“I’m not going to complain about you leaving early,” Antoinette said.

“I rely on you to manage your time, and I know you often work outside formal working hours to get the job done. Of course, in a creative role, such as the one you hold, it’s not simply enough to produce your own deliverables.

Part of the job is to be available for teamwork, for bouncing off colleagues, for taking old elements and combining them in a way that’s new—the essence of being creative. ”

Coralie felt herself run hot, then freezing cold. She was being told off.

“No, my real concern,” Antoinette went on, “is for your self-worth, your standing in your intimate relationship. I hope you don’t mind if I offer you some personal advice.”

“No, please.”

Antoinette bent her head and gently pressed her index fingers to her temples. “It’s one thing running around after your own child.” She looked back up. “It’s quite another to do it for someone else’s.”

···

It was a shock. As recently as Christmas, Antoinette had wrapped up a copy of Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In for Coralie and inscribed it: “From your mentor.” Her own builders were right that minute toiling on Wilton Way.

Did Antoinette even like her? Was her job in danger?

Coralie had transferred straight to London without taking a break.

Tuesday 5 a.m., her plane had landed. Wednesday morning eight thirty, she’d reported for duty in Clerkenwell an hour and a half before Antoinette had even arrived!

What more could she give ? She was thinking about all this, or catastrophizing (as thinking unfounded dark thoughts was sometimes known), as she strode up to Angel for the Northern line.

When she arrived, sweating, to Zora’s pickup area, she saw only five children left, and none of them was Zora. Panic ballooned inside her.

“Coralie!”

Thank God. She turned to find Zora. Behind her was Marina, with an open-hipped, rolling walk she hadn’t had less than a week ago at the party. “Did I…” Coralie began. “Weren’t we supposed to…”

But to her surprise, Marina looked a little sheepish.

“Sorry to be confusing. You and Adam do have her. I’ve done all my work, and I’m officially on mat leave, but Tom’s in Eastbourne until tonight.

My mum won’t get on the plane until I start contractions because my first labor took so long. I…Sorry.” Marina blinked up at the sky.

That was intriguing new information. (The only thing Adam had told her about Marina’s pregnancy with Zora was that Adam had put on weight.

“No offense,” Marina had apparently said, “but you’re getting really fat.

” Adam had responded gently that this caused him to feel offended.

“I said,” Marina had screamed, “NO OFFENSE!”)

“Can I go to Poppy’s for a playdate?” Zora leaped up to grab Marina’s arm. “Can Poppy come for a playdate?” The child who must have been Poppy stood back a little, smiling a shy smile and blinking behind purple glasses.

“Zora, please, don’t yank me, I can’t balance, I’ll fall over.”

“Let’s ask your mum instead.” Zora pulled Poppy’s hand and they ran off together.

“Argh.” Marina pressed her fingertips briefly on top of her closed eyes. “I just wanted to see her.”

“Oh, don’t worry,” Coralie said. “We could go to the park with her, or you could take her to yours—I could get a coffee, do some work in a café?”

Marina’s eyes sprang open instantly. She seemed to elongate from the spine. “She’s not going to Poppy’s, that’s for sure. Zora!”

After a while, Zora skipped back. “I don’t want to get the train, Mummy—I want to go home with you.”

Coralie’s heart sank. It was truly beyond her to assert any power over Zora’s movements. She didn’t have any power to assert.

But Marina held Zora’s hands and spoke in a kind, firm voice. “Sweetheart, I came to give you a kiss. I can’t keep you this week; Daddy and Coralie would be too sad.”

“It’s true,” Coralie said. “I don’t want to see your daddy crying, sobbing like a baby—do you?”

“Boo-hoo!” Marina said, surprisingly. “Boo-hoo-hoo!”

Zora laughed.

“And if we get on the train now,” Coralie said, “we’ll be in time for a Violet cupcake.”

“I didn’t hear that!” Marina threw up her hands. “Well, I suppose someone who’s about to be a big sister should have lots and lots of treats. It’s a very special time.”

Smiling, dodging running boys with untucked shirts, they made their way together to the gate.

···

Coralie had to admit it was not ideal to bring a seven-year-old into a building site, even though Oneal and his men were meticulous about their tools and swept up as they went.

She served Zora brown pasta and baked beans (separate) and ate her own brown pasta, peas, and cheese (mixed).

At the desk in the pink study, Zora was watching All Hail King Julien , a Netflix animated comedy about a party-boy lemur’s unlikely rise to power.

“This is just so funny,” Coralie kept murmuring, until Zora asked her if they didn’t have funny shows in “the olden days.”

After she put Zora to bed, Coralie half listened to the leaders’ debate on her laptop while searching for what Oneal had taught her to call “door furniture”—knobs and latches, et cetera.

Seven leaders was too many to have on one stage.

Ed Miliband had drawn the middle lectern—nice and central.

He was wearing a good suit and fizzed with almost manic energy.

But as she browsed and weighed up between lacquered and unlacquered brass, between bronze and cast iron, something began to worry her from her new perspective as a Labour supporter: She mentally tuned in only when it was David Cameron’s turn to speak.

A member of the audience asked a question about the National Health Service.

To her surprise, Cameron replied with a tremor of emotion in his voice.

“I’ll never forget, as the dad of a desperately disabled child, what I got when I took him to hospital every night worrying about his health.

I got unbelievable care, and I just want that for every family and everyone in our country. ”

She opened Google. There was a Guardian article from 2009 about the death of six-year-old Ivan, who’d had severe epilepsy and cerebral palsy.

“I know that the whole house will want to express their sorrow at the death of Ivan Cameron,” then–prime minister Gordon Brown had said in Parliament.

“He brought joy to all those around him. Every child is precious and irreplaceable.”

“His parents lived with the knowledge for a long time that he could die young, but this has made their loss no less heartbreaking,” the Tories’ William Hague had said in reply. “He will always be their beautiful boy.”

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Coralie moaned out loud, and began to cry. Maybe she shouldn’t have come off the Pill. She was nuts.

Ed was on fire! Adam texted later. Did you watch?

He did a great job! Coralie wrote back.

Was it a lie? No. Ed seemed like the type of guy who could do pretty badly. Not doing badly meant he had done well.

···

For Easter break, they’d booked Zora into a performing arts club in Islington so they could keep some semblance of a working life.

Signing her in took such a long time that Coralie didn’t get to Clerkenwell until ten.

Antoinette cruised by her and Stefan’s office and stared in, the Jaws music almost audibly playing.

She shivered. “Does Antoinette know I only just arrived?”

“I don’t think so.”

“What if she saw me walk past in my coat?”

“Why do you care? She’s your CD, not your parole officer.”

This was a bit much from Stefan, who used to beg her to jiggle his mouse so his screen stayed on when he went downstairs for a smoke. But he’d quit now and had replaced milk in his coffee with butter and had started “bullet-journaling” too.

All week Coralie felt her boss’s eyes on her, judging not only her competence as a worker but her status as a “creative,” a “career woman,” a feminist, and even her worth as a human being.

···

On Friday, Adam received a surprise text about a surprise holiday club concert.

He couldn’t attend—could Coralie? Coralie messaged Tom and asked if he was free.

Tom wasn’t; he was in court. She wrote to Marina but didn’t get a response till she’d raced to the community hall and slid into the last seat: So sorry , Marina wrote. I was in acupuncture.

“Don’t worry, Mum’s here now,” she heard one of the instructors say. And without wanting to hear it, despite closing her ears through an effort of will, she heard Zora respond, “She’s not my mum.”