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That’s OK.’
    â€˜The thing is, I just didn’t know if she’d want me to be here,’ I say. But I know this is not the whole story. The truth is, I didn’t know how to be here: I was scared that she would push me away when she only had weeks to live, and I knew there would be no deathbed reconciliations. Or perhaps it’s even more messed up than that. Perhaps I couldn’t face the thought that there would be a reconciliation – and then she’d die anyway. I have been a terrible coward.
    Alice drains her coffee then puts the mug carefully on the table. It is an Emma Bridgewater mug, with a cockerel on it. We both look at the cockerel as if it might leap up and tell us what to do now.
    â€˜Doesn’t it stop you sleeping?’ I ask.
    â€˜What?’
    â€˜All this coffee.’
    â€˜It doesn’t affect me at all.’ She takes a sharp, efficient breath. ‘I sleep like a baby. You should try drinking more of it yourself, Kal. You might be more helpful if you were less out of it.’
    I look at her. I want to tell her that babies do not, in fact, sleep – not mine, anyway. I have barely had an uninterrupted night in eighteen months. This might explain why my husband has … for a moment, the blood pounds in my ears.
    â€˜Sorry,’ she says. ‘No, sorry. God. I’m just … I’m tired too. I’m really, really tired.’ She rests her forehead on the heels of her hands. Her fingers are long and tapering, with soft cuticles and delicate pads and perfectly filed nails. ‘This is bloody awful.’
    â€˜I know.’ We sit in silence for a moment. Finn chomps at his toast and kicks his heels against the high chair.
    Our lives are so completely different. Alice spends her time in high-octane meetings and negotiations, flying business class to New York and Dubai and Singapore and Hong Kong, while I divide my time between Mummy and Me Music, Little Sunflowers Playgroup, Sainsbury’s, the swings, and the office – where I am becoming increasingly superfluous.
    â€˜So when are you going back to Oxford?’
    â€˜I don’t know. What about you?’
    â€˜Well, I have to head back to London today. I have this thing going on at work … you know what it’s like.’
    I really don’t, at least not any more, but I nod. ‘It’s OK, you should go. You’ve done so much here already.’ Finn has his sippy cup upside down now, and is pouring it onto the plastic table, then smashing his hand flat into the milk and sodden toast, splattering it across the floor.
    â€˜Should he be doing that?’ Alice says anxiously.
    I get up and take the cup away. He wails and holds out both hands for it. I give him back the cup and he spurts it into my face. As I wipe milk out of my eye, I remember I have three recorded interviews in the car. I should have left them in the office for someone else to work on. But it all fell apart so fast.
    I used to care about qualitative research into patient experiences. I used to put huge effort into getting the most truthful, enlightening story from each person I interviewed. But my work has been squeezed into one and a half days aweek and has, therefore, rendered itself almost pointless. The pay barely covers the babysitter. I leave things undone, half done, badly done – to be tidied up by others. But if I let my work go – the job I once loved, and worked so hard for – then what? I cannot see myself at home full time – I saw what that did to my mother. So the only answer is to work more, not less. But I can’t do that because then I’d have to hand Finn over to the babysitter for even longer, and that feels wrong too. He is so small and he needs me. He needs to know that his mother is always there for him, always puts him first.
    It would be easier if Doug’s work were more flexible. But as my job has been crushed