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“Tell me if you want anything from Westfield,” Adam said on the front step, resigned, as Flo kicked her snowsuited legs in the buggy. It had taken them twenty minutes to get ready.

“Nothing, I need nothing!” She kissed Zora on the head and whispered, “Thank you.”

···

There was nothing “creative” in her job as “a creative.” She’d spent ten years codifying tones of voice for brands.

When Antoinette, and now Stefan, presented designs, they were filled with Lorem ipsum.

Her own text came later, ignored if the client was illiterate, picked over—massacred!

—if they weren’t. Everything she wrote for work she viewed through a single lens: How will this cause me trouble?

It wasn’t a training ground for art; it was antithetical to it.

The mindsets were not compatible. When she opened her social media feeds, competing voices overwhelmed her, and she couldn’t hear her own.

“I like to write first thing in the morning,” authors said in profiles.

Coralie was lucky if Flo slept later than five.

She came to the page a broken woman. If she waited to be fixed, she’d never start.

Now she brought her laptop down from upstairs and sat at the kitchen table.

Without the girls and Adam, the house was silent, uncannily so.

She opened her long document and started reading from the top.

It was a story about someone like her. But it wasn’t her, and so far it wasn’t a story.

The father. What should she call him? She clicked into the paragraph and started typing: “Robert was capable of great charm.”

The floodgate of impressions opened. Her mind was overrun.

The problem with having a warm kitchen was that it sometimes became too hot.

She stood to remove her jumper. The moment it covered her eyes, she felt the presence of an assailant, someone sneaking up behind her to attack.

Her heart was pounding. She couldn’t sit back down.

Oh look, the washing machine had finished its cycle.

It was very, very dangerous to write even a sentence. Housework would keep her safe.

···

Coralie and Alice had comprehensively lost consent for the buggy.

Where before they could meet for a relaxed walk through London Fields and have a nice chat at adult level, they now had to muster the girls on foot, drag them or even chase them to get to Cotters’ Yard on time.

On Monday morning, after running wild for a while, Flo and Beauty squatted to inspect some muddy rocks.

“Anything good on for the week?” Alice said.

“We’re meeting Daniel’s new boyfriend on Friday.”

“ Oh là là! Beauty, no!” Alice grabbed her daughter by the hood to stop her toppling over. “Beauty, can you hop up? Hop up?”

“Flo? Can you hop up? We’ve got to get to nursery!”

When they made it to the Big Puddle, a permanent fixture of the park for the rainiest six months of the year, they were confronted by an unwelcome sight. Their friend Sabine watched proudly as her son Luka splashed in water up to his hips.

“Hi, Sabine,” Alice said.

“I won do go in the puddle,” Beauty said.

“Florence, Beauty, girls,” Coralie said. “No one’s going in the puddle.”

“There is no bad weather!” Sabine announced proudly.

“Only incorrect outerwear!” Luka was dressed in a full-body waterproof suit, Wellies up to his knees, like a Scandi noir policeman dragging the pond for a corpse.

“Coralie, did you hear?” Sabine said. “The ruling from the European Court? Article 50 can be revoked and Brexit canceled. Unilaterally! With no penalty! Maybe all our problems can be solved.”

At that point, Coralie’s main problem was Luka, who was shouting, “Florence W! Florence W!” (There were two Florences in the Duckling Room.) “Get wet! Get wet!” She felt anguish and fury rise within her, as if Sabine, a perfectly nice woman, and Luka, a perfectly nice boy, had been placed in her path expressly to make her late for work.

It was this bubbling, rising-heat feeling, this panic, that she knew was keeping her from getting pregnant.

Alice reached into her tote bag. “Anyone who’s not in the puddle can have a jam tart.”

Luka splashed out immediately.

“Genius,” Coralie said.

···

At work she was dealing with an unpleasant hangover from Antoinette’s time at the agency.

Somehow a Norwegian fossil-fuel company called Futurum had decided it was good and relevant comms to sponsor a major exhibition and events program at Vanessa Andorra, a woman-helmed contemporary art gallery in a vast warehouse on Regent’s Canal.

The deal was worth a spectacular ￡2 million over three years.

The first year, under Antoinette, most of the money had been spent on a series of sumptuous summer parties.

The second year, after Antoinette moved on, Stefan and Coralie had subcontracted an events team to run an outdoor cinema showing important documentaries.

Now, planning for the final year of the sponsorship contract had been unavoidably hampered by Greta Thunberg in her yellow raincoat holding up a homemade sign reading Skolstrejk For Klimatet .

“We would have got away with it,” Stefan said, “if it wasn’t for those pesky kids.”

For Coralie, it was a hard one. On the one hand: They were supporting contemporary art (good).

A show at the gallery could make a woman artist or an artist of color a star.

On the other hand, per multiple experts, there were just twelve years left to save the world (bad).

When she got in to the office that morning, Stefan was distraught.

Someone had started an Instagram account called Andorra’s No Tomorrow.

It called on artists and patrons to boycott the gallery until such time as its relationship with Futurum was renounced.

The campaign’s points were well researched and trenchant.

Perhaps most deadly of all, and especially wounding to Stefan, the design was very elegant.

Caught up in the crisis, Coralie didn’t check Twitter until elevenses (Pret white filter and a popcorn bar). There she discovered Theresa May was locked in an emergency conference call with her cabinet. Ten minutes later, the vote on May’s Brexit withdrawal agreement had been called off.

Coralie googled “How many days until March 29, 2019.” That was when the UK, unless the withdrawal agreement was passed, would crash out of the EU without a deal.

The answer was 109. The prospect gave her a brief apocalyptic thrill.

Sure, she was culture-washing a fossil-fuel company on a dying planet!

But if people couldn’t get fresh food or cancer medicine, she was less likely to be personally canceled.

···

Nursery had sent several texts pleading for all Duckling Room occupants to be sent in with a complete change of clothes. On Wednesday morning, Coralie was scrambling to get it all together when Adam whooped from inside the bathroom. She paused outside the door. “What?”

“There’s a vote of confidence in Theresa May tonight!”

“Poor old thing,” Coralie said.

Adam came down when she was trying fruitlessly to persuade Flo into her coat. “It’s all happening!” He was elated. “What a week!”

Coralie narrowed her eyes. “Please don’t forget we’re going to Daniel’s boyfriend’s.”

Adam froze. “Tonight?”

“Oh my God,” Coralie cried. “On Friday!”

“I won’t forget!”

“You already had!”

“Silly old Cor.” Adam gave a superior smile. “I mean I won’t forget it now !”

She didn’t find this as annoying as usual. Was it possible she was ovulating?

···

That day, at lunch, Coralie ate a Pret tuna sandwich at her desk and watched Prime Minister’s Questions on her laptop.

It was sad but sort of sweet to see Philip May in the Commons to watch his wife.

In 2017, after she’d lost her majority in the election, Theresa May had been horribly humiliated during her speech at Tory conference.

A prankster had run up to her to make a joke, the set had collapsed around her, and she’d coughed a horrible dry anxiety cough for what seemed like minutes at a time.

After that, apparently, May had gone offline for five hours, and no colleagues or advisers could reach her.

According to Adam, Philip had “talked her off the ledge.” (The “quitting as prime minister” ledge? Or the ledge ledge?)

Coralie drank her cup of tea and studied the Tory leader.

She was elegant and profoundly unusual. It was dreadful that this practical, dutiful woman with awful Tory politics but a firm hold on reality was being hounded by her colleagues (mainly men) who were living in a fantasy world, where the UK should be able to leave the EU with no penalties—only rewards!

Even Florence, at two and almost three-quarters, could grasp the sad fact that if you ate a cake, you no longer had it.

Well, it was not Coralie’s problem. She squashed her apple core into her sandwich box and tossed it in the bin.

···

That night, Coralie and Adam sat on the sofa together to watch the results of the confidence vote.

Immediately afterward, Adam would have to repair to the spare room to record an “emergency podcast” (under a blanket to boost the sound quality).

Now he looked up from his phone with a grimace.

“Apparently May had to swear she wouldn’t fight the next election as leader.

Apparently MPs were crying.” On the screen, a group of men and one woman trooped into the room and stared out solemnly from a splendid Westminster backdrop. “Oh—turn it up.”

“The parliamentary party does have confidence in Theresa May,” a tall man proclaimed. Tory cheers rang out, a complex mix of “Ooh” and “Wahey!” as well as a bit of “Hyar, hyar, hyar!”

“Oh, good!” Coralie said.

Twitter had the figures. Only 200 Tory MPs had voted for her; 117 had voted against. “She won, but it’s not a win,” Adam explained. “Thatcher got two hundred and four, and she still had to resign. May just can’t catch a break.”

“They won’t rest until she’s sobbing on the floor,” Coralie said. “I hate them.”

Parliament wouldn’t vote for the withdrawal agreement, the Tories wouldn’t change the leader, and the EU wouldn’t change the deal. Two and a half years after the shock referendum result, Brexit had hit a brick wall.