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so.
    ‘Honestly? Who cares? It’s only going to be their parents or their husbands and wives in the audience, anyway. You could stick them up there reciting nursery rhymes and their loved ones would probably be impressed.’
    ‘Oh God, why did I get myself into this?’
    ‘So you could meet me,’ Jen had said, and then she’d blushed at her own forwardness.
    Jason had given her a look that had made her stomach flip – and every other part of her body, for that matter. And then he’d leaned over and kissed her. She could remember the moment exactly. The thrill that had gone through her. And then
he had broken off and started coughing so hard his eyes had begun to water.
    ‘Sorry, sorry,’ he’d said, his voice cracking. ‘That’s what comes of pretending I smoke to impress you.’
    They had been together ever since.
    When Amelia opened the door, the familiar scent swept out after her. Still baking and coffee, but these days joined by the lilies she kept in a large vase in the hallway, and the cigars that Charles liked to enjoy after dinner some nights. Jen
had always thought she should bottle it, call it ‘Home’ and sell it as a room spray to people who were living apart from their loved ones.
    She tried to imagine what the scent of her own childhood home might be marketed as. ‘Bad Atmosphere’ or ‘Frigidity’, maybe. ‘Tension’ by Lancôme.
    She chided herself immediately, as she always did, for comparing her own family negatively to her adopted one. It was never going to be a fair fight. There were no level playing fields. People were dealt different hands and, however hard you
tried, you couldn’t make a royal flush out of sixes and sevens. It simply wasn’t possible.
    They were the first to arrive and, as usual, they all fell into their assigned roles. Charles handed round the gin and tonics. Jen followed Amelia to the kitchen and did whatever she could see needed doing, while Jason caught up with his dad in
the living room. It was a masterclass in gender stereotyping and one that, Jen knew full well, like most women of her generation, she would scorn under any other circumstances. She had tried on occasion, though, to accept Amelia’s protests that she didn’t need help, and to sit
and chat with the rest of the family in the hour before they ate, but she hadn’t been able to resist the
smells and the warmth and the acceptance of Amelia’s kitchen.
    So, on Masterson Sundays, she allowed herself to indulge her inner unreconstructed 1970s woman. When Poppy and Jessie arrived, they would laugh at her, as they always did, happy to let Amelia do what she loved to do and only offering up the
minimum of assistance.
    ‘So how’s it been?’ Amelia asked as she whisked flour into the gravy.
    Jen knew immediately what she was referring to.
    She had thought that Simone leaving home, two years earlier, would have gone some way to preparing her for the time when she and Jason would be left on their own. But, although she had missed her desperately – could almost feel her absence as a
presence, somehow, like a black hole, a vortex in the middle of their house – it was nothing compared to now. She had still had one child at home. She had still had a purpose, an identity. She’d comforted herself by transferring all her attention to her younger daughter, shoved her
head down into the sand and refused to look to the future, stubbornly failing to make any long-term plans. To be fair, Jason had reacted in exactly the same way, and they had never really discussed what might come later.
    Jen and Jason had always known Simone wouldn’t be an only child. In fact, once she had found out she was pregnant, Jen had been adamant that their offspring would never have the lonely upbringing she herself had endured, and Jason had
readily acquiesced. Emily had come along eighteen months later, before either of them could change their minds. If she hadn’t, Jen often said, they would have
tried IVF, adoption,