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take Freddie to school, when, er, you go back to work.” She blushes, wondering if she’s said the wrong thing. “Not that I want to…”
    I feel for him. Normally, at this juncture I’d read the signs, swoop into the conversation and pluck him out, the sunny, social one to counterbalance his northern, Heathcliffian tendencies. “Thanks. That would be great,” he mumbles, giving them what they want, waiting to be released.
    Tash looks around at the other women with a look of unmistakable triumph.
    Ollie digs his hands into his jeans pockets, attempts to walk away again.
    Not so fast, buster! “You will let
us
know, won’t you?” says Suze. She’s somehow standing in front of him without anyone being sure how she got there. It’s social kung fu. “If you need anything, Ollie, anything at all? Just pick up the phone. You’ve got my number,haven’t you? Let me write it out for you just in case. Oh, bollocks. Anyone got a pen?”
    Ollie grunts, like he always grunts when he begins to feel obligated. Ollie is one of the world’s kindest men, the best of men, but he hates obligation. He likes to think he can be selfish if he wants to. It’s an adolescent thing that lots of wives of music producers have to contend with. Most of the time his main selfishness, apart from nicking my moisturizer and refusing to cook, manifests itself merely in putting on headphones and sinking into his music, annoying but not up there in the great pantheon of male selfishness, clearly. I complained about this in the past but now wish I hadn’t, firstly because I knew about his antisocial solipsistic tendencies from the beginning—I’d wake up in bed to find him wearing these big fat headphones over his long hair and I thought it quite the sexiest thing ever—and also because the flaw, if it is a flaw, is just Ollie. I should have realized I’d have been bored to tears with the man I often complained he wasn’t, the domesticated, fully socialized, Muswell Hill thirtysomething dad behind the cake stall. Why did I not tell him more often that I just loved him as he was?
    Like secrets, words that are left unsaid get buried with you.

Four
    F irecracker.” Sam rolled off Jenny with a skin-sucking squelch. “I needed that.”
    Jenny flopped back into the slightly sinister microclimate of their Tempur-Pedic mattress. She did not feel like a firecracker. Since Sophie had died—three weeks, three days, fourteen hours ago—sex didn’t work, not for her at any rate. Sometimes she wondered if she’d ever orgasm again. Part of her hoped she wouldn’t. Sophie couldn’t. Why should she? She’d grown a giant retro bush. She’d stopped shaving under her arms. Yes, she was morphing into the world’s unsexiest creature. And she didn’t give a damn.
    She just wished her heart would stop slamming, that’s all. It was a frantic tattoo. She’d ditched coffee after one p.m., forced herself to bathe by candlelight before bed—setting fire to a tinderstick loofah in the process—but still her heart jumped about inside her chest like someone who’d snorted a kilo of amphetamine and was prancing about on a speaker in a nightclub.
    Sam yawned, releasing a mist of morning breath. Inside hismouth his uvula looked pink and animate, like it might have an opinion. It probably did. Later, she knew that he’d brush his tongue. He was the only person she’d ever met who brushed his tongue. She watched him fiddle with his omnipresent iPhone; Mumford & Sons poured out from a hidden speaker in the bedpost. The apartment was full of hidden speakers. Music suddenly blasting out of cabinets and walls and baths like raucous ghosts, making her jump. It was a boy’s apartment, home to families of remote controls, gleaming with hard, aeronautical steel surfaces, smelling of freshly ground coffee. It was like waking up in Business Class every morning.
    He trailed a finger down her shoulder. “Shall we ambulate down to the greasy spoon?” He didn’t look