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Despite being nearly thirty and a woman, Coralie had always existed in a child-free world.

No younger cousins, no babysitting, certainly no peers with kids.

As for her own childhood, it was a closed book—one she had no desire to open.

She knew from both literature and popular culture that being a mother was all joy and no fun, that the days were long but the years were short, that making art was incompatible with having babies, and that if a man was present in the delivery room and saw you giving birth, your sex life would never recover.

(“It was like my favorite pub burning down”—Robbie Williams.)

Being a stepmother was famously even more difficult.

You barely heard stepmother without the word evil before it.

( Bzzt! Getting ahead of herself! She and Adam were not married!) Children seemed, on the one hand, a lot of work, and on the other, terrifying: What vulnerabilities might they glimpse?

Without the veneer of civility that governed the behavior of adults, what unpleasant truths might they utter?

Before her first planned meeting with Adam’s daughter, Coralie found herself studying her face anxiously in the mirror.

She had a hormonal blemish on her chin—what if Zora pointed it out?

The first part of the meeting, the coffee (and babyccino), passed by in a haze of politeness and nerves.

It was only when they got up on their hind legs and strode out into the street that Zora assumed her correct proportion in relation to Coralie: not a giant, sinister opponent but a young, small, very appealing person.

She had a long plush toy snake lashed to the front of her scooter with a hair ribbon.

“Is that your most special toy?” Coralie inquired.

“Ha,” Zora darkly laughed. “ N - O spells no .”

“We no longer take the most special toys out of the house,” Adam said.

“Because Mummy’s boyfriend, Tom , lost my owl at the zoo .” Zora turned her little face toward Coralie. “What do you call a snake who works for the government?”

“This was also a present from Tom,” Adam murmured.

Oh, it was a joke. “What?”

“A civil serpent.” Zora dashed her sneaker on the pavement and scooted off.

Of course, it would’ve been hard for Zora not to be clever.

Soon after meeting Adam, Coralie had searched for the barrister profile of his ex, Marina Amin.

She was familiar with super-academic legal high-achievers from her time with Josh.

He and his friends never did anything unless it could go on their CVs.

Even so, she’d been shocked by Marina’s top-tier intellectual credentials: with honors; with distinction; first in year; winner of this, winner of that; her Spanish merely “conversational,” she was fluent in Italian and French.

“Pfff!” Adam had scoffed when she raised this.

“Marina’s Spanish is just French in an Italian accent. ”

At Hackney City Farm, in its charming cobbled courtyard, Adam slipped on some sort of animal poo. “Yuck!” he whispered, horrified. “Yuck, yuck, yuck.”

As he gingerly cleaned his shoes in a puddle, Coralie and Zora wandered over to the pigpen. There, three crossbred Piétrain sows reclined luxuriously as if taking the mud for their health.

“Cora-nee,” Zora said. “I have a question.”

“Oh, um.” Coralie blanched, preparing for something about feelings, or Adam, or their arrangements, or her intentions, or marriage. She would always take her seriously, she vowed then. For as long as she knew Zora, she wouldn’t lie. “Go for it!”

“Are pigs waterproof?”

She didn’t know what she had expected a child to be like, but it was never as great as this.

···

Not long after, on a beautiful warm day, Coralie and Adam were lying in Coralie’s bed in the oblong of sun from the skylight.

Adam had collapsed on top of her, still inside her (though not hard), and her hips were aching, but she didn’t want to move.

“Half term” was starting soon, whatever that was, and he’d be going to the seaside with Zora.

He invited Coralie along, but (from some old instinct about fathers and daughters, entirely gleaned from novels) she said no.

Soon the reality of not seeing him for at least seven days overtook her, and she found herself almost in tears.

There had been lots of country boarders at her school, in their chambray shirts and Tiffany heart chains, and one of them had told her a fact about farm dogs.

This girl, who was frankly weird, although she had more friends than Coralie, said you should never separate animals who were having sex, because pulling the penis out roughly would bring out all the other animal’s insides and guts with it, eviscerating it and killing it.

Coralie relayed the memory to Adam. “That’s exactly how I feel,” she said.

She was being serious, almost hysterically so. Adam had a serious face on when he replied, “Like…a dog?”

“No,” she almost shouted. “Like eviscerated and murdered!”

“Oh, thank God,” he said. “You’re the girl dog in this scenario.”

“I don’t care which dog I am! I’m telling you how I feel when we’re apart!”

“And I’m telling you I feel exactly the same! Completely bereft,” he said. “Except—with a penis.”

···

She wanted two children by the time she was thirty-five.

She wanted them close in age, unlike her and her brother, and she wanted to keep working, unlike her mum.

Adam had always wanted a big family. She didn’t care about getting married, but if they did, she’d like a registry-office situation followed by a small formal dinner.

He didn’t care about getting married, but if they did, he’d like a registry-office situation followed by a big, long honeymoon.

Her greatest fears were of being homeless, of being in an acid attack, and of angry sounds: sighs, clicks, tsks, grunts, anything that showed she was about to get told off.

His were of mice, of erectile dysfunction, and of seeing his partner crying and not caring to find out why.

We always have to talk to each other, they said. And they were certain, bone-certain, they always would.

···

Her lease came up for renewal, and he didn’t ask her to move in with him—he just assumed.

They were sitting at Railroad, a restaurant between London Fields and Homerton Hospital.

It was small, relaxed, and you could watch the two owners cooking the three or four options on the menu.

Adam and Coralie each had a glass of red wine while they shared some salami and pickles.

That was when he said it: “ When you move in…”

She sat for a moment in silence. She hardly registered the rest of the sentence.

“Oh no,” he said. “You don’t want to? Is this a Virginia Woolf thing? Room of one’s own, et cetera?”

“God, of course not. I love your house. Besides, I’m not a writer.”

“I’ll come back to that and argue with you later. Is it a Zora thing?”

“Oh God! No!”

The question mark stayed on Adam’s face. “It’s just,” Coralie said, “I feel like I’ve never told you why I moved to London—in the first place.”

“To work on your vitamin D deficiency? Craving Tory austerity? To lower your life expectancy? For the knife crime?”

“Sometimes you make four jokes when one would do.”

“I know,” Adam said. “It’s because I’m short.”

“Now I’m laughing—how can I tell you my bad story?”

He reached around the salami plate for her hand. “Tell me.”

The breakup with Josh had been bad. Not because she still wanted to be with him, which she hadn’t, by the end—but mainly because he’d bought out her share of their nice old flat. His parents had transferred the money to her bank account with the bleakest description field ever: Coralie Final .

It had been nice to have the money back, equivalent to every dollar she’d saved working since she was nineteen. Still, she would have preferred to have a home.

She packed her stuff, shipped her books to Darwin, and—unable to imagine a new park, a new tram route—moved a few blocks up the hill.

The new apartment was small, blank, charmless, safe.

It was late summer when she moved in, and all the trees had leaves.

By winter, obviously, many didn’t, and she found to her dismay that, from the window in her new living room, she could see her old seventies apartment block.

Not into the bedroom! Which Josh by then shared with Lucy!

Nothing like that! The way the light played over it at sunset, that sort of thing.

No way—she couldn’t live there. She found the most lucrative job someone with an English degree could find (in Sydney, in advertising) and paid to break the lease.

It really hurt to waste that money. She could never tell her mum.

Adam snorted. “Sounds perfectly reasonable to me.”

The waiter came over to refill their wineglasses. She started on the next bit of the story, but the waiter returned with their mains. She picked at her pilaf and wondered if she could go on. It was all so horrible (the story, not the food). It was all so grim (that was an Adam word). So sordid.

“Go on,” Adam said. “Please.”