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Back upstairs, she checked the clock: nearly seven-thirty. She propped her phone on the kitchen windowsill and started her good-morning Spotify playlist, which was mostly Beyoncé. She turned the volume up to full.

“Rise and shine!” she called cheerfully on her way up the stairs. She loved these stairs: grand and curving with a polished oak banister, built for a different era. Archie’s room was first. Tenderly, she kissed him on the forehead and he woke up with a grimace and then, when he opened his eyes, a smile. “Time to get ready for school,” she whispered and indulged herself in a tiny cuddle, only one, while he was still sleepy and warm and before he pulled away.

His school uniform, tiny and heart-achingly grown-up, was folded ready on the chair. “Do you want help getting dressed?” she asked.

“No,” he said, already getting out of bed, tousle-headed and dogged, and so much like a tiny version of her own dad that sometimes it made her laugh and sometimes it made her worry.

In the next room Lucy Rose was awake already and on the floor with her toy flamingo, talking to it in a made-up language. She barely looked up when Marina came in.

“Time to get dressed.” Marina selected an outfit from Lucy Rose’s drawers, though she knew that Lucy Rose would reject it. But choosing the wrong clothes for Lucy Rose was the only surefire way to get Lucy Rose to stop playing with her flamingo and focus on getting dressed.

“No, I want pink ,” Lucy Rose said when Marina held out a pair of leggings.

“These are pink.”

“The other pink.”

There were no other pink leggings. “Which do you mean, Luce?”

Lucy Rose got up with an exaggerated sigh and started digging through her drawer. “ This pink,” she said, pulling out a pair of green striped leggings.

“Oh, I see. Do you want me to choose a top for you?”

“Go ’way.” She waved her hands at Marina in a shooing motion. Thank God Lucy Rose insisted on getting her hair cut short last week, because that removed at least half an hour from their morning routine.

In the room across the corridor, Ewan was still half-asleep. She picked him up out of his cot and settled into the nursing chair with him, grateful for this gentle waking, this moment of connection.

One day, none of her children would need her. From the moment they were born, they started their journey away from you. But for ten minutes, she was a good mother, and everything that her youngest child needed.

Then she thought about Xavier.

She carried Ewan downstairs, shepherding the other two down before her. Lucy Rose wore a black top with the logo “Disco Queen” and a red cloak left over from Halloween. Fortunately, Archie had dressed himself beautifully in his school uniform, tucking in his shirt and arranging his collar perfectly neatly outside his sweater. He even had his shoes on the correct feet.

The next twenty minutes were taken up with toast, cereal, permission slips, homework, spilled juice, and a minor disagreement about using a tissue. Then there was the normal hunt for shoes, jackets, security blankets, wipes, and a small plastic penguin. The doorbell rang.

“That’s Opal!” she said brightly.

“Who’s Opal?” asked Archie.

“She’s a friend of Mummy’s who’s going to look after the house while I take you to school and nursery.”

Thereby proving that Marina was not only a violent kidnapper and a “psycho cunt,” but also a person who lied to her children. None of this was on her bingo card for divorced life.

“What’s that noise?” asked Lucy Rose.

“Oh, it must be the Andersons’ construction next door.”

It did not sound like construction. It sounded like Xavier discovering that his lunch contained a sandwich made of sweets.

She opened the door for Opal.

“How do you look so well rested?” Marina asked.

“Hot yoga and expensive skincare.” Opal came in and put her Chloé tote on the tiled floor. “How’s your guest?”

“Not as quiet as I’d like him to be,” whispered Marina. She brought Opal through to the kitchen, where she stopped in the doorway and looked horrified.

“These are children,” Opal said.

“Yes. This is Archie and Lucy Rose, and the little one in the high chair with jam on his face is Ewan. I’m about to take them to their gran’s house.”

“I’m dressed as Super Poo,” said Lucy Rose.

“Lovely,” said Opal in a tone that conveyed that she did not find the situation lovely at all.

* * *

At her mother’s house, Marina folded up the pushchair with one arm and leaned it against the wall. “Everything Ewan needs should be in that nappy bag.” She passed Ewan over to her mother.

“You haven’t toilet trained him yet, I see.”

“Mom, he’s fifteen months old.” She knelt down and whispered to Lucy Rose, “Remember not to bite either of your brothers, okay sweetie?”

“Only if I have to.” Lucy Rose skipped off to the cupboard where her grandmother kept the coloring books.

“That child is strange,” opined her mother.

“She is wonderfully unique.” Marina put the packed lunches in the refrigerator. “Archie will need picking up at school at half past two.”

“Well,” her mother said. “Of course my grandchildren are always welcome here, and they can stay as long as you have more interesting things going on elsewhere. This rift in the family isn’t their fault. Did I tell you about how much Neil’s extension is going to cost? Even if he only hires Albanians?”

She would not apologize, nor would she rise to her mother’s bigotry.

“Thank you for looking after them. I really appreciate it and I know they love time with their grandparents.”

“What’s so important that you have to leave them?”

“I told you on the phone—they’ve found some asbestos in the cellar, and it’s not safe for them to be in the house until it’s all been removed.”

“Ah,” said her mother. “Beware Greeks bearing gifts.”

Marina was not sure what that had to do with asbestos, but her mother had seemingly believed her lie. Who knew it would be this easy?

“Mom, can I ask you something quickly? What do you remember about Nana Sylvia’s last husband, Barry?”

“Why are you asking about him?”

“There are some photographs in the house, and I wonder if they’re him,” she lied, again. “I don’t remember him very well.”

“Well.” Her mother settled into the breakfast nook with relish, to partake in her favorite pastime: gossiping about the rest of the family. “You were only a baby when she married him. I never liked him.”

“Why not?”

“He was too young for her, for one.”

“How old was he?”

“At least a dozen years younger than her. I said to her, ‘Mum, what’s in it for him?’ But she didn’t listen, of course.”

“Mum, you’re ten years younger than Dad.”

“It’s different for women.”

She resisted asking “why?” because that was a rabbit hole that she didn’t have time for. “What did he look like?”

“He was very good-looking. If you like that sort. He loved clothes. Which made me wonder sometimes, was he gay and Mom was his, what do you call it?”

“Beard.”

“Who’s got a beard?”

“Never mind. Anyway, he might have been bisexual but he definitely wasn’t gay, because Nana Sylvia said he was the best in bed of any of her husbands, but in a showy way, like he felt he had an audience.”

Her mother grimaced. “I do not want to know.”

“Fair enough. So what happened to him?”

“He went off. Saw a better opportunity, probably. That sort usually do. Went out to play golf one day and never came back. And then it came out that he was having affairs right left and center, with every woman in west London practically. He liked teenage girls.”

“Ew. That sounds more like a creep.”

“Exactly. Anyway, good riddance, I thought. At least we won’t have to share the inheritance with him.” Her eyes narrowed. “Oh, is that why you’re asking?”

“Like I said. I didn’t remember much about him.”

And that, at least, wasn’t a lie. It was the truth. Marina had been too young, and she didn’t remember much about Nana Sylvia’s last, creepy, philandering, disappearing husband. Except for one thing.

He liked to wear a bow tie.