‘Olive, what’s nursery like?’ I asked her. I had picked up some miniature chocolate cakes from a bakery on the way over, and she was already cresting a sugar high. One of my favourite things about my goddaughter was how utterly obsessed she was with food – it made it very easy to make her love me.

‘Olive,’ Katherine said brightly and loudly. ‘Tell Aunty Neenaw about nursery.’ Olive continued to ignore us both, her fingers jabbing into the cakes with a smile on her face, while she chewed the first two she had stuffed in her mouth before the plate had even reached the coffee table. Katherine sighed. ‘Are you going to tell her about your friends?’

‘How old are you now, Olive?’ I asked, bending closer towards the apple rounds of her cheeks in profile. She turned her face to me – the same alabaster skin as her mother was smeared with brown buttercream.

‘Chocklit cake,’ she said slowly and surely, like a child about to undergo an exorcism in a horror film.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And how is nursery?’

‘Chocklit. Cake,’ she repeated.

‘Okay and what’s your favourite colour?’

She turned away from me, already bored by this game, and picked up another miniature sponge, stroking it like a pet hamster.

‘Chocklitcake.’

‘Imagine if happiness was as easy in adulthood,’ I said, sitting back up on the sofa. ‘Imagine if that level of divine contentment were that accessible to us.’

‘I know.’

‘It must be good to know you can completely control another human with sugar. Enjoy this phase because as soon as she’s a teenager, it will be money.’

‘It’s bad, though,’ Katherine said, tucking her bare feet underneath her impossibly long legs and blowing on the steaming mug. ‘I’ve started using cakes and biscuits as a way to buy some conversational time with my friends when they come over. It keeps her distracted, but I don’t think it’s proper parenting.’

‘Every parent does it.’

‘Yes, and I actually think we’re much better than most,’ she said briskly, the tireless performance of perfect motherhood resuming after a sentence-long interval of humility. I took a long glug of my coffee.

‘How are you?’ I asked.

‘I’m good, I have some news actually,’ she said, leaving a dramatic pause. ‘I’m pregnant.’

I feigned total surprise – squealing sounds, face agog, put my cup down, the lot. ‘When is it due?’

‘March.’

‘How exciting.’

‘You’re going to have a little brother or sister, aren’t you, Olive?’ Katherine said.

‘Ice cream,’ Olive replied flatly.

‘No, no ice cream,’ Katherine sighed.

‘Cake!’ I said, picking one up and waving it under her face. ‘Look, yummy yummy cake. Have you told work?’

‘Not yet. I’ve actually decided not to go back after I have the baby and take my mat leave pay, so I’m going to have to play it all very delicately.’

‘Oh, wow,’ I said. ‘That’s great. Are you looking for other jobs?’

‘No, we’re actually thinking of moving out of London.’ There was a brief silence as I quickly replayed all the conversations we’d had over the last year to remember if she’d ever mentioned this before. ‘Which will give me a chance to properly think about what it is I want to do once I have both kids.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah, we’ve been talking about it a lot – Olive, don’t eat the cake casings, honey, that won’t taste good.’ She reached over and pulled one out of Olive’s grimacing mouth. ‘And we could get somewhere bigger while reducing our mortgage and the kids could have a proper childhood.’

‘We grew up in London, do you not think we had a proper childhood?’

‘We grew up in the very furthest edges of the suburbs, which is barely London.’

‘We’ve discussed this – if there are red buses, then it’s London.’

‘There was a man outside Tooting Broadway station the other day selling blocks of hash before midday. Olive tried to grab one because she thought it was a biscuit.’

‘BISSKIT!’ Olive suddenly shouted, Lazarus returning from her sugar coma.

‘No biscuits, you’ve just eaten four chocolate cakes.’

‘Bisskit, Mummy, please,’ she said, her squeaky little voice and rosebud mouth beginning to wobble.

‘No,’ Katherine replied. Olive marched into the middle of the living room and threw herself on the floor like a grieving Italian. ‘MAMA, PLEASE!’ she wailed. ‘NEENAW, PLEASE, BISSKIT. BISSKIT. PLEASE.’ She began to cry.

Katherine stood up. ‘It’s just never-ending,’ she said. She returned a few seconds later with a custard cream. Olive’s sobbing ceased instantly.

‘Where would you move to?’

‘Surrey, I think, near Mark’s parents.’

I nodded.

‘What?’ she asked.

‘Nothing.’

‘I know you have all those opinions about Surrey.’

‘I don’t.’

‘Yes you do.’

‘Do you know anyone who lives there?’ I asked. ‘Apart from Mark’s parents.’

‘We do, actually – do you remember Ned, Mark’s best friend from school, and his wife, Anna?’

‘Yes, I met her at your birthday last year and she spoke exclusively about her kitchen extension.’

‘So they’re in a village not too far from Guildford, and she says there are lots of mummy friends around there who she’d happily introduce me to.’

Mummy friends.

‘Okay, that’s great,’ I said. ‘I just don’t want you to be lonely.’

‘I’ll hardly have a chance to get lonely, London is a half-hour train journey away. It would take me as long to get into central London as it would you, probably.’

‘That’s true,’ I said. I didn’t think it was true at all, but I was familiar with this defensive heat in her voice and I was keen to throw a bucket of ice on it. ‘And we’ll always have the phone.’

‘Exactly,’ she said, playing with Olive’s dark, soft tendrils of hair. ‘This all began on the phone.’

‘Do you remember what we even talked about? I still don’t understand how we could have spent all day at school together, then two hours on the phone every night of the week for seven years.’

‘That bloody landline. It’s all me and my mum used to argue about. I always remember your dad coming to pick you up from mine and he’d printed out pages and pages of his BT bill. He and my mum sat at the kitchen table with two sherries trying to work out what they were going to do about it, like a meeting between two heads of state.’

‘I had forgotten about that.’

‘How is your dad?’ she asked.

‘He’s the same.’

‘Has he not got any better at all?’

‘It doesn’t really work like that, Kat,’ I said, quite unfairly, because I also hoped she wouldn’t ask me how it did work.

‘Okay,’ she said, putting a hand on my arm. I was grateful for Olive, who could act as a conversational worry doll when I was with Katherine. I too started curling her soft strands of hair around my fingers. ‘Have you seen Joe recently?’ she asked.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I must see him. I assume he’s still with Lucy?’

‘He is.’

‘She’s from Surrey.’

‘Is that why you don’t like her?’

‘No, I have at least fifteen reasons why I haven’t warmed to her other than the fact she’s from Surrey.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like she once told me she finds air travel “glamorous”,’ I said. ‘Or that she still boasts about the fact she got her Mini Cooper custom-painted a specific shade of duck-egg blue.’

‘They were here for dinner last week.’

This annoyed me, even though it shouldn’t. Mark and Joe became friends when the four of us used to hang out and we agreed when we broke up that we were allowed to each keep our respective half of Katherine and Mark.

‘How was it?’

‘It was good,’ she said. ‘I like Lucy, she’s very … creative.’

‘She does PR for a bubble tea company.’

‘Don’t be snooty.’

‘I’m allowed to be snooty about bubble tea.’

‘I always thought you’d end up back with Joe.’

‘Did you?’

‘Yes, Mark and I both did.’

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know, you just always seemed like such a good fit. And it made life so easy.’

‘What, you mean easy for you and Mark’s social plans?’ I said, sounding snappier than I meant to.

‘Well, yes, sort of.’

‘You can invite Joe and me both round for dinner, you know. We’re still really close.’

‘I know, but it’s not the same.’

‘I’ve started seeing someone,’ I said reflexively.

‘Have you?!’ she yelped, with more surprise than I would have liked.

‘Yes. Well, just one date. But he’s brilliant.’

‘What’s he called?’ she asked, her pupils – I swear – dilating. I knew she’d love this – I was speaking her language now. Dates, man, love, potentially someone for me to bring round for Mark to talk about rugby and traffic with.

‘Max.’

‘Where did you meet?’

‘Through a dating app.’

‘I think I would have loved those apps.’

‘Would you?’

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Although I do feel lucky that I never had to use them.’ Another fleeting moment of self-awareness. ‘What’s he like?’

‘He’s tall and intense and clever and fascinating and a bit …’ I browsed for a word I’d been looking for in the days since I met him, trying to piece together his face from my woozy, boozy memories. ‘Twilighty. You know?’

‘No.’

‘There’s something dark and magic about him, while being wholesome. Wholesome in an essence-of-man way. He’s sort of biblical.’