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hadn’t spoken to him since the day the police had come to the office.
    He stared at the phone. Other than Gemma, there was really no one he could talk to without having to explain what had happened. Everyone he knew was in tech anyway, and with the exception of Ronan, he wasn’t sure how many of these people would qualify as actual friends. He stared at the wall. He thought about the fact that during the last week he had driven up and down to London four times just because, without work, he hadn’t known what to do with himself. He thought back to the previous evening when he had been so angry, with Deanna Lewis, with Sidney, with what the fuck had happened to his life, that he had hurled an entire bottle of white wine at the wall and smashed it. He thought about the likelihood of that happening again if he was left to his own devices.
    There was nothing else for it. He shouldered his way into his jacket, picked a fob of keys from the locked cupboard beside the back door, and headed out to the car.

CHAPTER FOUR
Jess
    T here had always been something a bit different about Tanzie. At a year old she would line up her blocks in rows or organize them into patterns, and then pull certain blocks away, making new shapes. By the time she was two she was obsessed with numbers. Before she even started school she had worked her way through the local bookshop’s collection of math workbooks for years two, three, four, and five. She would tell Jess that multiplication was “just another way of doing addition.” At six she could explain the meaning of “tessellate.”
    Marty didn’t like it. It made him uncomfortable. But then anything that wasn’t “normal” made Marty uncomfortable. It was still the thing that made Tanzie happy, just sitting there, plowing through problems that none of them could begin to understand. Marty’s mother, on the rare occasions that she visited, used to call Tanzie a swot. She would say it like it wasn’t a very nice thing to be.
    —
    “So what are you going to do?”
    “There’s nothing I can do right now.”
    “Wouldn’t it feel weird, her mixing with all the private-school kids?”
    “I don’t know. Yes. But that would be our problem. Not hers.”
    “What if she grows away from you? What if she falls in with a posh lot and gets embarrassed by her background? I’m just saying. I think you could mess her up. I think she could lose sight of where she comes from.”
    Jess looked over at Nathalie, who was driving. “She comes from the Shitty Estate of Doom, Nat. I would be quite happy for her to lose sight of that.”
    Something weird had happened since Jess had told Nathalieabout the interview. It was as if she had taken it personally. All morning she had gone on and on about how her children were happy at the local school, about how glad she was that they were “normal,” how it didn’t do for a child to be “different.”
    Tanzie, meanwhile, was more excited than she had been in months. Her scores had been 100 percent in maths and 99 percent in nonverbal reasoning. (She was actually annoyed by the missing 1 percent.) Mr. Tsvangarai, ringing to tell her, said there might be other sources of funding. Details, he kept saying. Jess couldn’t help thinking that people who thought money was a “detail” were the kind who had never really had to worry about it.
    “And you know she’d have to wear that prissy uniform,” Nathalie said, as they pulled up at Beachfront.
    “She won’t be wearing a prissy uniform,” Jess responded irritably.
    “Then she’ll get teased for not being like the rest of them.”
    “She won’t be wearing a prissy uniform because she won’t be bloody going. I haven’t got a hope of sending her, Nathalie. Okay?”
    Jess got out of the car, slammed the door, and walked ahead so that she didn’t have to listen to anything else.
    —
    It was only the locals who called Beachfront the “holiday park”; the developers called it a “destination resort.”