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“Two Novembers in a row I tried to conceive, and both times I missed the window. I needed an August baby to save me a year of paid childcare. I’m forty now.

Last November was probably my last chance—that’s what it felt like, anyway.

” Lydia placed a long, elegant hand on her bump.

“And it worked. My hope is that everything goes okay, medically. My fear is that a part of my child will always be a stranger to me, and they’ll grow up feeling like a science experiment rather than the product of love. ”

“Swap legs, circle around the other hip. Anyone here a lesbian?” Everyone glanced around.

No one raised their hand. “That’s funny—Hackney?

Normally quite a few. Well, one thing you find with same-sex parents.

The baby comes to resemble them both, bio and non-bio.

How? Expressions. You don’t just have genes in common; it’s that daily face-to-face contact.

Even if you share no genes, they become like you.

Baby mirrors you, you mirror baby. There will be nothing about your baby that’s strange.

You longed for her, even before she was conceived, and did everything to make it happen.

It’s the greatest love story in the world. Next!”

Tears had come to Coralie’s eyes from “the greatest love story in the world.” “Um.” She blinked them away.

“I’m Coralie? I’m turning thirty-six pretty soon.

Oh, the baby! Thirty-two weeks. This is my second baby, I have a little girl, and I’m missing her bedtime right now.

” She cleared her throat. “Sorry! My first birth wasn’t that great, I found myself getting scared. My hope is that this one’s better.”

“And your fear?”

“Umm—everything else.”

There was a comforting sound, a quiet, warm swelling of group laughter.

“It’s a very scary time,” Fiona said. “Next!”

···

Back home, Adam had made spaghetti Bolognese.

The kitchen smelled of burned garlic. The outline of each piece of onion was clearly visible, which meant they hadn’t been cooked long enough.

The tinned tomatoes were still chunky and vivid red.

But the meat was properly brown, and he’d grated a lot of Cheddar.

Starving, she asked for seconds. He served it to her, gratified.

She waved her phone. “Just updating Alice.”

“Did you find your new Hackney wife?”

“A woman called Lydia, maybe? A single mum. Hang on, who’s that?”

There was a tiny TV in the kitchen, which Adam used to watch Newsnight when he was “doing the dishwasher” (his main item of housework, much mentioned by him).

On-screen, a beefy white man was pushing through throngs of other beefy white men.

He was wearing a homemade T-shirt that said, in white letters on a black background, Convicted of Journalism.

“That’s Tommy Robinson.” Adam turned the volume up on Sky News. “The far-right guy.”

“To the judges at the Old Bailey, he’s Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, and they’ve already found him to be in contempt of court….” the journalist said over the footage. “Arrested outside Leeds Crown Court last year, he was broadcasting live on social media about a sex abuse case.”

On the screen, the reporter held the microphone up to Robinson in the crowd. “I’m telling you!” His face was red with fury. “I am being sent to jail for doing what you just done!”

Adam pressed the mute button. “He’s asked Donald Trump for asylum.”

“Um, why?”

“He says he’s being persecuted as a citizen journalist.”

Coralie put her arms around him. “I’m getting you that shirt for your birthday.”

Adam laughed, and they hugged for a long time, but when they separated, he looked rueful, gray, and tired. When he opened the dishwasher, it was with the grunt he used to signal that something was not okay, and that it was probably her fault, or at least required her attention.

She paused on her way up to the bath. “Do you want to talk to me about anything?”

Adam was blank.

“Because you’ve got your blank face on and you’re making your little resentful grunts.”

Adam grunted. “I’m not resentful,” he said in a resentful voice.

“Is it the dishwasher? You hate it?”

He wedged the pasta pot into the bottom tray. “No one likes doing the dishwasher.”

“This is your last chance…” She was walking backward. “To reveal your emotions…” She had reached the pantry. “Or stay forever silent.”

“Journalism,” Adam said. “I don’t really feel like I do it. Bits and bobs. The newsletter. The podcast. It’s not exactly Woodward and Bernstein.”

“You write books ,” Coralie said. “People would kill for your career.”

“It doesn’t seem very serious .”

Coralie had read lots of novels about this—Updikes, Roths, that one where Leonardo DiCaprio couldn’t move to Paris because Kate Winslet got knocked up (at least, that was the movie version).

She could all too easily inhabit the mind of a man in his forties, one who felt disappointed, stymied, perhaps—cockblocked.

Men were supposed to pursue, hunt, fight, and excel.

Cooking for his pregnant wife, loading the dishwasher—constraints on his freedom, any at all, restrictions on his God-given rights and ability to go out and do anything he wanted at any time.

It lowered his testosterone, made him less of a man, could actually kill him .

Domesticity! That was to blame, that was behind the so-called stalling of his career, that was what his tsks and sighs were conveying to her in the kitchen.

Nothing to do with the changing media landscape, that all the old certainties had been torn away and that unprecedented access to behind-the-scenes info had revealed every job in the world to be shit.

It was her fault, that’s what he was saying.

“Actually,” she said, “I think you’re doing really well.”

He shrugged, but not angrily.

And it was a measure of some new maturity, as well as of how tired she was, that she simply left it at that.

···

Upstairs, Florence was sleeping like a baby (on her back, with her arms in a triangle above her head).

In bed, Adam folded himself around Coralie, both of them lying on their sides. “I can’t believe tomorrow’s the last normal pickup.”

It would be the last Friday of Zora’s primary-school life, although school continued till Wednesday of the following week. After the summer holidays, they’d agreed with Marina that she’d catch the train to Wilton Way each weekend on her own. The change couldn’t be more significant.

“I don’t want to think about it,” Coralie said. “She has to stop growing right now.”

Inside her, her new baby kicked and swirled. A boy this time. His face had been perfect in the sonogram, pointy-nosed and elegant like Dan’s. She still had years of children being children in her house. Decades. Sometimes it was a terrifying thought. But that night she found it a comfort.

···

The weekend was so fucking horrible it was a relief to drop Florence at nursery on Monday and get the bus to work.

Coralie had never seen Zora act like that before.

A friend’s party had been in the diary for weeks, and the present (lip balms in four flavors and a book token) was wrapped and ready on the mantelpiece.

But when the time had come, Zora had refused to go.

She’d screamed at Coralie and Adam, stomped up the stairs, and slammed the door.

Just as they thought they’d calmed her down, some other little thing had set her off.

She’d been unrecognizable—either shouting or in tears for two days.

She was due to be at Wilton Way for the first two weeks of the school holidays. Coralie was starting to dread it.

At work, perhaps fortunately, there was no time to think about Zora. Stefan nabbed her before she had time to put her bag down: “Vanessa Andorra’s having second thoughts.”

She hadn’t wanted to waste any maternity leave before the baby, but thirty-two weeks, on the cusp of thirty-three, was far too far along to still be expected to work.

It was inhumane. She wished she’d never had the shrooms by mistake.

In the days that followed, before she knew she was pregnant, something else was also gestating, an answer to a problem: the three-year sponsorship deal signed by Futurum, the gallery, and the agency under Antoinette.

It was inconceivable the parties would renew the agreement when it ended this summer.

Per the contract, however, the final event still had to be held.

In those heady post-shroom days, when parts of her brain lit up and connected in new ways, Coralie had come up with what she believed could be a solution: Feel Tank.

Get it? Like riffing on a think tank? (Sadly, when she googled it, she found it was not original.) Anyway, Futurum would be paying for a weekend festival of interactive exhibitions, workshops, and events on the topic of emotional dynamics in public life.

It hadn’t been difficult to persuade high-minded intellectuals and principled activists to speak, for a large fee, at a much-admired contemporary art gallery.

It had been a lot harder once it was revealed that the event’s sponsor was Futurum.

The agency promised zero interference, no topic off the table, no restrictions on what might be said about climate, fossil fuels, even the company itself.

Slowly, the program built up and filled out into something she could almost be proud of.

The merch was also great. Tote bags, patches, badges, posters—all covered in the word Feelings.

The launch on Friday night would be catered by a Syrian refugee charity kitchen (the food was stunning; Coralie had tested it). So what was Vanessa’s fucking problem?

Stefan was walking and talking like someone on The West Wing . “We’re doing this in my office.”

My office.

Stefan’s iPhone was on his desk. He took it off mute. “Vanessa, I’ve got Coralie.”