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Marja has headed down Frobisher Street. Lila thinks she may keel over and die if she has to look at that glossy tousled blonde head again. "Just...fancy a change," she says.

"You're being really weird," says Violet. She stops and pulls from her rucksack the packet of root-vegetable crisps that Bill must have put into her bag instead of Monster Munch. He's trying to improve their diet. Violet slows to eat them, so Lila is forced to slow too. "Mum?"

"Yes?"

"Did you know Felix has worms in his bottom? He put his finger up there at break to get one out and show us. You could actually see it wriggling around in his fingernail."

Lila stands still and digests this. Normally such information would have made her scream. Right now it feels like the least terrible thing she has heard today. She looks down at her daughter. "Did you touch it?"

"Ugh. No," says Violet, popping another crisp into her mouth. "I told him I was going to stay exactly ten miles away from him forever. And the other boys. They're all disgusting."

Lila pulls her palm down over her face slowly and lets out a long, shaky breath. "Never change, Violet," she says, when she can speak again. "You've already acquired so much more wisdom than I ever did."

CHAPTER TWO

In the days since Dan leaving, and her mother dying, Lila has developed a series of strategies to get through each day. When she wakes, mostly between five and six a.m., she slugs down an anti-depressant citalopram with a glass of water, dresses before she has time to think, and walks Truant for an hour, striding up to the Heath where the early-morning dog-walkers cross muddy paths with the lone coffee-drinkers and grim-faced runners in earphones. She walks while listening to audiobooks or chatty, anodyne podcasts, anything to ensure she's not alone with her thoughts.

She returns and wakes the girls, bribing and cajoling them out of bed and onto the school run, trying not to take personally the harrumphing and cries of anguish about missing socks and phones. Since Bill moved in with them he has made breakfast, insisting that the girls eat porridge with berries and a variety of seeds instead of Lila's Pop Tarts and three-day-old bagels with jam. Bill is rigorous about diet and talks endlessly of fish oils and the scouring properties of lentils, ignoring the rolling of the girls' eyes, and their longing looks toward the box of Coco Pops. In the evenings he rustles up nutritional meals involving unfamiliar vegetables, and tries not to show his hurt when the girls grumble that actually they'd rather have a ham and cheese toastie.

When Lila returns from dropping the girls, she sits in what is laughingly called her study, a room near the top of the house still lined with the battered cardboard boxes of books they never unpacked, and attacks the most urgent admin of the day. This—and its accompanying financial calculations—exhausts her so she often has a little nap on the sofa-bed, or occasionally lies on the rug listening to a soothing meditation podcast, trying to ignore Truant's barking downstairs. She tries to eat regularly so that her blood sugar does not drop, and her mood with it. When she wakes up, she shakes off her grogginess with a mug of tea, and then goes to the shop for whatever they don't have. By then it's usually time to collect Violet, at which point she becomes Mum again, with no time for invasive thoughts, engaged instead in endless domestic warfare against mess, laundry, homework, the respective travails of her girls' days, until bedtime. Then she takes two antihistamine tablets (the doctor will no longer prescribe her preferred sleeping pills: apparently they are now considered a "dirty drug"), or sometimes, if in a pronounced insomniac phase, smokes half a joint out of the window. Finally, when she feels mildly confident that sleep is approaching tentatively, like a skittish horse, she switches on a sleepcast—in which soft-voiced actors read boring stories in monotones—and prays not to wake again within a couple of hours.

She does not want to think about her ex-husband and his effortlessly gorgeous new partner. She does not want to think about his and Marja's spotless home up the road, with its sparse selection of stylish objects and Noguchi coffee-table. She does not want to think about her absent mother, who had somehow made all of this mess so much more manageable.

Some days, Lila feels as if she's battling everything: the furious, slippery contents of her brain, her wavering, unreliable hormones, her weight, her ex- husband, her house's attempts to fall down around her ears, the world in general.

As the girls get up from the supper table that evening, leaving Bill gazing reproachfully at the unfinished bowls of venison and pearl barley stew ("It's a very good meal—high in protein and low in fat"), Lila realizes with an internal thud that a whole new battleground has just opened up: Dan's new baby. This child will be the half-sibling of her daughters, a constant presence in all their lives. It will have an equal right to whatever their father has—money, time, love. This child, more than anything else, makes it all real—Dan is never coming back, no matter how unlikely she had known that was. This child is going to be a new thing for Lila to deal with—possibly daily—for the next eighteen years. And the thought makes her want to ram her knuckles into her eye sockets.