THE BABY GROUP
Caroline Corcoran

Copyright

Published by AVON

A division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020

Copyright © Caroline Corcoran 2020

Cover design by Claire Ward © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020

Cover photograph © Peter Hatter/Trevillion Images

Caroline Corcoran asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008335120

Ebook Edition © September 2020 ISBN: 9780008335137

Version: 2020-07-25

Praise for Caroline Corcoran

‘A rival to Gone Girl for its addictive, twisted plot’

STYLIST

‘[A] successful foray into Girl on the Train territory, replete with jealousy, stalking, gaslighting and control-freakery’

THE GUARDIAN

‘A deliciously twisted thriller’

RED

‘This atmospheric read really ramps up the pace as it nears its chilling end’

GOOD HOUSEKEEPING

‘Corcoran maintains suspense throughout and is brave enough not to opt for a fairytale ending’

DAILY MAIL

‘A well-paced, insightful but ultimately twisted look at modern life’

SUN

‘The narrative flows effortlessly as the tension ramps up’

MY WEEKLY

‘I could not put it down … a fantastically written, deeply dark story that raises important issues’

THE COURIER

‘A claustrophobic, creepy and atmospheric read’

WRITING.IE

‘A terrific debut, which gripped me from the very first page’

CASS GREEN, bestselling author of In a Cottage In a Wood

‘The writing is so vivid it’s frightening … an astonishingly powerful exploration of how our own minds can be the darkest, scariest places of all’

DAISY BUCHANAN, award-winning journalist and author

Dedication

The Originals: Mum, Dad and Gem

Epigraph

‘Let her cover the mark as she will, the pang of it will be always in her heart.’

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise for Caroline Corcoran

Dedication

Epigraph

Prologue: Scarlett

Chapter 1: Scarlett

Chapter 2: Scarlett

Chapter 3: Scarlett

Anon

Chapter 4: Scarlett

Chapter 5: Scarlett

Chapter 6: Scarlett

Anon

Chapter 7: Scarlett

Anon

Chapter 8: Scarlett

Chapter 9: Scarlett

Chapter 10: Scarlett

Anon

Chapter 11: Scarlett

Anon

Chapter 12: Scarlett

Anon

Chapter 13: Scarlett

Chapter 14: Scarlett

Chapter 15: Scarlett

Anon

Chapter 16: Scarlett

Anon

Chapter 17: Scarlett

Anon

Chapter 18: Scarlett

Chapter 19: Scarlett

Chapter 20: Scarlett

Chapter 21: Scarlett

Anon

Chapter 22: Scarlett

Anon

Chapter 23: Scarlett

Chapter 24: Scarlett

Chapter 25: Scarlett

Chapter 26: Scarlett

Anon

Chapter 27: Scarlett

Anon

Chapter 28: Scarlett

Chapter 29: Scarlett

Anon

Chapter 30: Scarlett

Chapter 31: Scarlett

Chapter 32: Scarlett

Chapter 33: Scarlett

Anon

Chapter 34: Scarlett

Chapter 35: Scarlett

Anon

Chapter 36: Scarlett

Chapter 37: Scarlett

Chapter 38: Scarlett

Chapter 39: Scarlett

Chapter 40: Scarlett

Chapter 41: Scarlett

Emma, guest on a parenting podcast

Chapter 42: Scarlett

Chapter 43: Scarlett

Chapter 44: Scarlett

Chapter 45: Scarlett

Epilogue: Cora

Acknowledgements

Keep Reading …

About the Author

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

Prologue
Scarlett

It’s a strange thing, thinking about who released the sex tape of you while you eat a blueberry muffin next to your baby.

My mind ticks away, somewhere else entirely while Cora, Emma and Asha – the friends I made at NCT antenatal classes – rock their own babies to sleep, pick up slobbery teacake from the floor, grumble about daily grinds, everyday problems.

Not like mine, I think. Not life-destroying.

A shriek from Cora brings me back to the present with a jump because I am nervous at the moment, edgy.

I look at my friend, and see her mouth full of large veneers, white as toothpaste.

It’s surreal that I’m still functioning here, in normality.

‘I told you!’ Cora yells at Asha, loving being right. ‘Told you it was her.’

Asha is standing up, trying to rock her baby back to sleep but disturbing the smooth rhythm with shoulders shaking in amusement.

Emma points to Asha’s mint tea. Raises her eyebrow at her in silent question.

‘Yes please,’ Asha says, through her laughter.

Her own hands are too full of baby to hold a drink so she sips from the tea Emma holds out to her as though she’s an elderly relative in the care home: mouth a little dry, darling.

My own hands – barring the muffin – are free, a rarity. My daughter Poppy is sleeping next to me in her pram under a bright green blanket gifted to me through my parenting blog, Cheshire Mama. Poppy snores lightly through Cora’s shrieking, the whirring of the coffee machine and a contentious elderly book club on the next table.

Lucky girl. Her mother can’t nod off despite blackout blinds and severe sleep deprivation at the moment.

I think of the sex tape again. Feel my stomach plunge.

Then I’m back, Cora brandishing her phone in my face.

‘See!’ she yells, victorious. ‘We do get exciting things happen here. Sally from Home and Away’s best friend circa 1995, just over there burping her baby. Like we do! She’s not even rubbed in her dry shampoo so her roots look grey! And her, a celebrity.’

I raise my own eyebrow.

‘I’m not strictly sure we’d call her a celebrity …’ I say.

Cora rolls her eyes.

‘Here we go,’ she says. ‘Cue name-drops from Scarlett’s glamorous former life in the fancy millennial office in Manchester.’

Former life. That bruises.

‘Says the WAG,’ I mutter.

My regular mocking of Cora for her pre-marriage days dating a subs’ bench regular from one of the lower league Cheshire clubs washes over her like a spray tan. She waves a dismissive hand, nails concluding at violent points in bright red. Squeaks as she crosses her legs, one over the other, in leather leggings.

Suddenly a baby – not mine – lands in my lap.

‘Need the loo and he’s just woken up,’ mutters Emma, tiny hint of a Welsh accent. ‘Thanks, babe.’

I sit Emma’s son Seth up on my lap. Push my turmeric latte further away across the table so he can’t reach the hot drink.

Seth smiles up at me, knowing my face and clearly reassured.

There are people who know Emma better than we do. We only met her – and each other – fourteen months ago. But time scales alter when you’ve crossed to a new life plane.

I watch Asha place a sleeping Ananya like a glass vase into her pram and ruffle Seth’s hair as she sits down. As Poppy wakes up, I hand Seth over to Asha and pick up my girl and it’s Cora’s turn – her daughter Penelope still asleep – to feed me a giant chunk of that blueberry muffin. On the one hand, it exacerbates the nausea that’s constant for me at the moment. On the other, I need the sugar to ease my trembling. Also constant.

Out of nowhere, Poppy brings up a bit of milk and I don’t have a cloth. Three muslins appear in my line of vision, along with wet wipes and antibacterial gel from Emma, now back from the toilet.

We’ve just sat back down when Cora starts looking twitchy.

‘Can I tell you a secret?’ she says suddenly, like it’s bursting out of her.

She leans in, conspiratorially. Emma follows. Asha next. We meet in the middle like the hokey cokey.

‘Is it that you don’t really make your cupcakes?’ I whisper, hammy, about her bakery business. I have never seen Cora and those nails stray near a mixing bowl. I’m fairly sure there are zero-hours workers in her outbuilding currently shoving chocolate buttons in icing.

‘Don’t worry,’ I carry on, deadpan. ‘I won’t expose you to the Cheshire Mama crowd. It’ll be just between us.’

I often promote Cora’s Cupcakes on my Instagram. She does the same for Cheshire Mama on hers.

Cora gives me a death stare. Then smirks.

‘Actually,’ she says. ‘I’m sleeping with someone else.’

If the look that would normally accompany this revelation would be guilty, Cora’s face with its extra long eyelashes and its possible fillers and definite Botox bucks the trend. She is kind of … proud.

I glance at Emma. Did she know? She and Cora have been friends for a long time, way before NCT, so she must know Cora’s husband. But Emma may look the most shocked.

‘Seriously?’ says Asha.

‘Who?’ I ask.

Cora’s smile fades; she looks taken aback at the question. She rallies quickly.

‘He’s the teacher at hot yoga,’ she says, speaking the way she pours champagne, quickly, spilling over. ‘Hunter. Utterly dreamy. Exceptionally bendy.’

‘Bloody hell,’ says Asha. ‘I was not expecting that. How long for?’

‘Since Penelope was four months old.’ Cora laughs. ‘I know, it sounds crazy.’

‘How could you be bothered?’ I ask. ‘When Pen was that young and you were so knackered.’

Cora shrugs. ‘Gave me something to make an effort for. I was sick of the leggings. Sick of the giant pants.’

We all nod in recognition. New mum life is the opposite of an illicit affair.

There are gags, then, about Cora’s downward dog and we annoy the book club with shrieks of dirty laughter.

‘Come on then,’ Cora says. ‘That’s my biggest secret out. We’ve known each other long enough now. Anyone else got any? The babies are nearly one. Time to liven up this mum chat.’

My heart begins to smash into my chest.

Poppy’s tights are damp where my palms touch her.

And it’s on the tip of my tongue, then, burning like hot coffee.

Could I tell them? Now?

It would be a relief, to have it out there. It would be awful, knowing that they know.

Asha. Emma. Cora.

I look at them.

Is it possible to keep it from them anyway, now it’s out? Is it better for it to come from me?

It rewrote everything, becoming a parent, and friendships were one of the areas that had the strongest edit.

I thought I had to accumulate mum friends when I had a child so my real friendships could still be sexy on the other side, with their Pinot Noirs and their gossip, and without everyone thinking, Yeah but remember that voice she sings ‘Wind The Bobbin Up’ in, as I danced at a grown-up party in my mini dress.

But that wasn’t what happened.

Instead, those ‘real friendships’ faded away, their place usurped by my mum friends, and there are no women I am closer to than Asha, Emma and Cora, even though we’re chips-and-salad different.

And yet, I haven’t told them about this thing that consumes me.

About the sex tape that almost everyone in my life was sent just over a few weeks ago.

I saw it, first, in the boardroom at work on my first day back from maternity leave.

The film played, bad quality from a second in time just before the world was viewed through flattering filters and cute effects.

I stared at the screen.

A woman; two men.

My ex, Ollie.

A friend of a friend of ours, Mitch.

The woman: unmistakably me, albeit a different me.

In that room in central Manchester, I looked down at myself: cobalt blue midi, large diamond on my ring finger, nails painted carefully in two layers of black. In the mirror opposite, long legs crossed, bright white trainers. The resting bitch face I’m told intimidates people. Big brown eyes, hard eyes.

I looked back at the screen.

The me on there wasn’t the one that commuted in from the countryside with bags under her eyes. Not the one that buys gender-neutral, organic brands for her baby girl. Not the one who puts the broadsheets in the recycling bin and runs 10k for fun at the weekends.

But the old one.

Party Scarlett, who if she by some miracle had money in her bank account, spent it all on drugs. Harder drugs, more drugs. Party Scarlett didn’t feel fear; there was nothing to be scared for.

Party Scarlett flitted between jobs in pubs and got sacked for not turning up. She spent summers working in clubs in Ibiza. She slept all day and eye-rolled about fidelity and marriage and people who had sensible jobs because none of that was fun. She stayed out later than you, partied harder than you, was more, more, more than you, but felt less than you really, so much less.

The Scarlett I had tried so hard over the years to bury.

I glance again now at my friends, alternating between analysis of Cora’s affair and the placating of their babies.

That Scarlett, they have never known.

And they never would have.

Except that now, that Scarlett has been exhumed.

I don’t know why or by who but I know something: bringing old Scarlett back from the dead like this is about to smash my carefully curated world apart.

1
Scarlett

Before

4 May

Fourth of May, Pay Day, my husband Ed and I have nicknamed it. Today is my first day back at work after almost a year of maternity leave and the day our finances, even if they’re still less stretched than most people’s, stop taking the battering of being one salary down.

Leaving my eleven-month-old daughter will be torture; not having to ask my husband for pocket money won’t be.

This morning I have been awake since 5 a.m., fuelled by worry and newness and the running through of which items are going in which of Poppy’s bags like I am on an excruciatingly dull quiz show.

At five thirty Poppy joins me, sitting in her highchair and grinning with her new top teeth on show as I spoon-feed her Weetabix. I feel my stomach lurch. She slaps her lips together for a kiss and I lean in, coating my face in slobbery cereal mush.

‘Love you, Pops,’ I tell her. I wipe my mouth though. It’s still gross, even with the love.

As I carry on feeding her breakfast, we listen to Noughties dance mixes like we always do when we’re alone and Poppy shrieks with delight at the familiarity of ‘Lola’s Theme’. I am too tired to dance, but I smile at her as she tries to and I’m glad that she loves it like I love it. The beat has always soothed me. It’s even helping a little this morning.

‘Right,’ I mutter, to Poppy or maybe just to myself. ‘What next?’

This process of breakfast takes fifty-five long minutes, during which one person poos (not me, as if I have time for such luxuries) and I pay an overdue payment for Poppy’s sensory class and order new baby sleeping bags.

As Poppy gums on a banana, I take out the pile of washing that’s in the machine, hang it up and put on a load of baby vests. I try to have a conversation with my daughter as I walk around the kitchen because I read that that was crucial for speech development, even if she responds with babble. I pronounce my g’s when I do it, in a way that isn’t natural for me and my Manchester accent but in a way I am determined to do because I want better for Poppy, more.

I dash back to my phone on the table to chase up the date for Poppy’s one-year check then I walk around the room trying to identify a weird smell I eventually place as tuna in the food bin.

‘Shit,’ I mutter, as I drip bin juice on the floor taking out the bag, then keep my fingers crossed that swearing doesn’t count towards speech development.

I open the front door, do a quick scan then Usain Bolt it to the outside bin in my dressing gown. As I mop the bin juice up back in the kitchen, I hear the shower turn on upstairs.

‘Take your time, Ed,’ I mutter, about my husband who is just getting up when I am on task number 345 of the day.

I think about how I’m about to leave my funny, bright Poppy all day with the childminder and feel like I can’t breathe. I think about remembering how to do my job, and feel similar.

Turning the radio volume down and flicking over to Radio 4, I switch the day to Ed mode. Ed can’t bear dance music and I gave up trying to persuade him otherwise long ago.

The radio presenter informs me that it is 6.45. I look up from the mop as though she has personally offended me.

Now I am in a panic that I will be late, which is ridiculous, since I have been up since 5 a.m.

I calculate.

To get to the childminder then the station and be at my desk in central Manchester on time from my home in Sowerton, our small village in Cheshire, even if the normally fuckupable train line fucks up, I need to leave the house at 7.05 a.m.

Right.

Okay.

Twenty minutes. That’s doable.

‘Morning, darling,’ says Ed, walking into the kitchen. He kisses my head then pours out coffee from the pot I’ve made for him. He holds it up. ‘Thanks for this.’

He takes a gulp.

‘Fourth of May, Pay Day.’ He smiles.

‘Don’t talk to me about it,’ I snap. ‘I’m too nervous.’

I look over at my own coffee – made far earlier – that sits uncupped by human hand and chilly on the kitchen table.

I have been waiting for the holy grail of a window when it is hot enough to comfort but cool enough not to burn my child, causing social services to take her away and my life to be lived under a cloud of horror and guilt. It’s a difficult balance to nail. There’s no time to drink it now.

I glance at the clock.

6.50.

Oh God.

I still need to shower, whack some eyeliner on – the rest I can do on the train, but my eyeliner requires a proper mirror especially when I am out of practice at looking like a human existing in the real world – and get dressed.

I shove Poppy at Ed, pause, then come back for an extra kiss and crazy mum smell of her head.

‘Don’t drink that coffee while she’s near you,’ I shout, flying upstairs into the bathroom. ‘And have you seen my coat?’

Ten minutes later I am back downstairs and shouting. ‘You must have moved it!’

‘Calm down a second,’ says Ed, putting a hand on my arm from where he sits at the kitchen table drinking his second coffee as I pass.

I stand still.

‘Right,’ he says. ‘Speak to me. Are you still on about the coat?’

‘I laid it out last night,’ I reply, trying to stay calm so I don’t get sweaty. 7.01. This carefully curated ‘back at work and still dressing like a non-mum, don’t write me off’ midi dress and new trainers outfit doesn’t need sweaty. ‘Right there.’

I gesture to the kitchen chair.

‘Your denim jacket is on the coat rack,’ he says like he’s come up with an ideal solution, standing up and putting some bread in the toaster. My heart is hammering in panic. ‘You can wear that!’

I stare at him.

‘I cannot wear my denim jacket on my first day back in the office, Ed,’ I hiss. Poppy is on the floor with her chunky little arms in the air, asking to be picked up. I pick her up. I have my dressing gown back on over my dress: this child knows when to projectile vomit. Dry-clean only silk Whistles is just her thing.

7.03.

‘Why not?’ said Ed. ‘Just ditch it as soon as you get there. No one will notice.’

He smiles.

‘And you always look lovely in a denim jacket.’

I stop for a second and smile back.

Yes, in beer gardens, Ed. When the sun stops warming us at 10 p.m. over a G&T.

I don’t have time to explain to him that if I turn up to work in anything less than new, slick attire, my obscenely young team will tuck me away in that mum file.

Since we had Poppy, he still wears the same suit on his same-sized middle. When she was born, he took no more time off than a colleague who went on a summer trip to Majorca. There has been no seismic shift. It’s one of the ten thousand or so double standards in our life now.

She’s been on maternity leave, they would think. She’s not a serious player any more. Expect her to leave at 4.59 p.m. for pick-ups; one eye on the clock. She’s a mum now and that explains the denim jacket. Next week: meeting in her Ugg boots; work wines in her baggy leggings.

The sweating starts again.

‘I’ll just have to go without a coat,’ I bark, before asking the digital speaker what the temperature is outside.

‘Quicker to stick your head out of the door,’ mutters Ed.

‘Luddite,’ I mutter back, as I shove a dishwasher tablet in and whack the machine on while brushing my teeth.

Why is the dishwasher still my job, I think, when I am going to work now too?

Ed bends down to kiss Poppy in my arms and I notice his hair is greyer than before.

‘Good luck, darling,’ he says, as he kisses me too, hard on the mouth, one hand on my bum cheek. Even in the chaos, I think, I still fancy you.

Ed leaves for work. Like he is used to doing; like is normal to him.

‘Thanks,’ I yell as the door slams and I collect a handful of bags while holding a wriggly Poppy.

The speaker says it’s fifteen degrees but I leave the house without a coat anyway.

Piling a babbling Poppy into her car seat, I mumble to myself. ‘A denim bloody jacket.’

As Poppy and I drive in silence to the childminder’s house, I think about Ed, now on his own in the car to work. It’s only a thirty-minute drive away but he needs to be in early today. He looked distracted this morning, like he often looks distracted these days, and I wonder if it’s work or something else. I frown.

He needs order, Ed. Not chaos and lost jackets and Weetabix on the floor and lateness.

I have a pang of regret that I can’t provide that for him but another pang of regret that he doesn’t play a role in making that happen in our house himself.

Because in my enthusiasm for meeting a respectable, handsome man with a proper job and a close family – a man who also looked at me like I was the hottest woman he had ever seen, and the feeling has always been mutual – I overlooked the fact that he is Radio 4 traditional and I am … not.

The differences weren’t so noticeable when we rented in a city and ate Deliveroo for tea but now we own a house in the countryside and have a child? They’re sticking their head above the parapet, about chores, about parenting, about work, and sometimes it’s like I’m a Trotskyist in a coalition with the far right. But still, I think, we love each other. We don’t have to agree on everything.

A few minutes later I pull up outside the childminder’s up the road. Ed hadn’t offered to do it but I wouldn’t have let him anyway. This was my multitasking horror show; no one else’s. I wanted to settle her in. I wanted to mourn the end of maternity leave. I wanted to write lists and pack seventeen bags last night like a ritual and huff about it. Parental gatekeeping, I think the books call it.

Apt for a gatekeeper, I make Poppy hold on to the gate of Ronnie’s house with her tiny Peppa Pig backpack on and snap her from behind so I can use the picture for a back-to-work post on my parenting blog later.

‘Is it okay?’ Ed asked, concerned at first when I launched Cheshire Mama. ‘Privacy wise, to show off our home and our daughter?’

But I swept away his concerns.

‘Oh, everyone does it, Ed,’ I said dismissively. ‘It’s the twenty-first century. Life’s online. I’ll keep an eye on it, make sure there’s nothing weird posted on there.’

Ed didn’t raise it again. He trusted me. I worked in digital marketing, did a lot of social media. This was my world. Plus we saw kids’ films for free in the best seats when they first came out and a fancy coffee machine arrived by courier. I told him that potentially, this blog and my Instagram could start to make us money. That was enough to stem any objection.

It gathered pace, the numbers rolling in.

‘We’d get more followers if we showed the whole family off,’ I told him, with a grin. ‘You, topless at the coffee machine should do it.’

I raised an eyebrow, questioning.

Based on the number of women who stared at him on the street though, I knew a lot of women would enjoy staring at him in the privacy of their own homes. And funnily enough, when I did start to include him, it boomed fast.

‘You do that all the time,’ my half-sister Josephine tells me whenever I give that verdict about the brand’s success. ‘Give Ed all the credit; don’t give yourself any. Cheshire Mama is successful because it’s a good blog. You have the eye, you’re funny, you know your stuff on social. The whole leaving the city and being new to the countryside is relatable.’

I drop my phone into my bag. ‘Okay, Pop, got it!’ I say. She’s used to posing for my iPhone by now.

I take her hand and we walk in.

Ronnie was recommended to me by Emma, whose son Seth goes to her too. I’ve met Ronnie twice. She seems lovely. She also obviously has, you know, paperwork and things.

But I am leaving my child with her all day. Is this insanity? Is it legal?

‘Good morning, Poppy!’ singsongs Ronnie in her gentle Brummie accent as we walk in, heaving four bags and a suitcase-load of anxiety. ‘And good morning, Scarlett.’

She looks at me with pragmatic empathy. It’s a very specific expression.

‘Big day today, I know,’ she says. ‘But we’re going to have fun, aren’t we Poppy?’

I fend off tears by speaking fast, with no let-up.

‘She doesn’t have a dummy except for her nap, which will be at eleven, eleven thirty but definitely not after three because otherwise sleep is a nightmare later,’ I ramble.

I realise why I am shattered all the time despite Poppy, finally, sleeping well. It is the level of detail in my head. The tiny things I know about my daughter’s needs and her day and that I am tick, tick, ticking and checking and balancing all day long.

The parenting stuff is often left to me. It’s my head that’s crammed full of its mundanities.

Ronnie smiles.

‘Got it,’ she says. ‘We do naps straight after lunch anyway. All tickety-boo.’

Serene. Experienced, both at childminding and looking calm in front of irritant mums, I suspect. Meanwhile it is me versus the sweat again.

‘Milk, water, snacks in the Peppa rucksack,’ I say as Poppy crawls to the doll she can see in the living room.

‘Change of clothes, nappies, Doggy Dog – that’s what she calls it, it doesn’t have a name – all in this one.’

I gesture wildly at one of the eighty-five zip compartments in my changing bag.

I look up at Ronnie. Still serene.

I point at bag three.

‘This one is toys.’

Then I look at Poppy, yanking the doll round the room by its hair in one hand as she crawls, and my face goes red.

Ronnie smiles.

‘I know you have toys. But in case she wants her toys.’

Bag four.

‘Stickers, books, crafts … I guess this bag is the calmer stuff. For when she needs to relax. Perhaps around three thirty?’

‘Perfect,’ says Ronnie kindly, gently, like she is trying to deflect a toddler from a tantrum. ‘We’ll do some of that later.’

I’ve overdone it. Even I know it. But if you pack enough bags, the feelings of guilt can perhaps be squashed under their weight. If you buy enough stuff, perhaps what you can’t purchase – time with your daughter, sanity, a mind that isn’t running away with thoughts about the right time to get out Doggy Dog – isn’t as obvious.

Serene, serene, serene. I can’t hear any other children; we must be the first. This is early. Poppy will spend so many hours here. Oh God.

I stare at Ronnie. On the surface: maternal, cosy. Her hair is short in a way that says practical and efficient. Her clothes would be able to go in the boil wash that her job probably requires. She’s about to turn fifty, has children of her own who are in their teens now and has been a childminder, I know from the chats we had at Poppy’s settling-in days, for upwards of sixty kids. Seth has survived; thrived, Emma says.

Everything seems right.

But I panic.

Does Ronnie’s mask slip when the others arrive and then she loses her shit, desperate for everyone to shut up? Would she ever lose it with Poppy?

Me versus sweat, me versus sweat.

But then I remember my pièce de résistance.

My document.

This document that will make everything okay and keep everyone happy.

Mostly me.

But also everyone else.

Okay really, just me.

‘This is a schedule of Poppy’s whole day,’ I say slowly, unrolling the document like I am presenting a degree, so that Ronnie gives this masterpiece the gravitas it deserves.

In my head, I am already having a conversation with Asha in which she is congratulating me on multitasking to such a level that I have documentation on my daughter’s oatie bar consumption.

‘You. Are. A. Machine,’ she will say. ‘How you have time to do your job, keep on top of house stuff AND write a schedule of Poppy’s day is beyond me. It’s beyond all of us. It’s beyond womankind as a whole.’

But, bursting my bubble, Ronnie is kind of … ushering me out of the door.

‘Don’t worry about a thing,’ she says. ‘It’s going to be smooth sailing here.’

I glance down. My document is bunched up in her hand. I have a deep-seated suspicion that Ronnie will never read it.

And meanwhile the one who matters doesn’t care about the document either.

Instead, Poppy is sitting next to Ronnie’s foot, poking her moccasin slipper and pulling at the bottom of her leggings. I bend down to say goodbye and Poppy’s rosebud lip wobbles.

My insides feel as though they have a hand roaming around in them, jiggling things about, perhaps performing some sort of surgery that involves the removal of an organ. I feel emotions that I can’t name, tormented at the idea of walking away from her.

I have heard so many people talk about this feeling when you leave your child but I’m sure mine is worse. The worst.

I push past Ronnie and gather Poppy up, stroking that short fuzzy brown hair and smothering her in I love yous. She’s come dressed for fun: leggings and a T-shirt, ready to play, make mess, do all the things that Poppy likes doing. It’s going to be okay. It’s going to be okay.

I take a deep breath.

‘Right, chicken, you have the best day,’ I say but she doesn’t look convinced. She knows something’s unusual. And she’s suspicious of Ronnie.

Gulping back a sob, I plaster on a pretend smile.

‘Mummy’s going to work for a while now but I’ll be back later to get you,’ I say.

She doesn’t quite cry.

‘She’ll be fine,’ says Ronnie, softly. ‘And so will you. Hey, by the way are you the one who does the Cheshire Mama blog?’

I nod, distracted by Poppy. Not now, Ronnie. Do I look like I can hold a conversation?

‘I love that blog!’ She smiles. ‘About time we got something local to us. Well done.’

I say thank you, then kiss Poppy ten, twenty, possibly thirty more times before I drag myself out of the door. If I don’t leave now I will be late and then I will be officially bad at parenting and work, which is really everything, so I will be officially bad at everything.

I cry so hard on the drive to the station though that the windscreen has the visibility of mid-thunderstorm. On the train, I had planned to do the back-to-work post on my blog and reply to a backlog of messages and comments on my Instagram.

The numbers have been growing so fast that I’m starting to make a tiny bit of money from it with affiliate links but that means there’s more pressure to keep up. And days like today, I don’t have it in me to be visible. If I post, I have to be ready to do the follow-ups, replying and responding. Being on.

Instead, I turn off and go insular, blasting house music into my ears as loud as it will go and carrying on with my sobbing.

I wait for it to ease but the further away I get from Poppy, the worse I feel. I calculate how long it will take me to get back to her if she needs me, all the routes and ways I could get there. I google taxi companies at each town we get to, to see if that will get me there faster than the train back to my car.

Further away, further.

The ache is deep in my insides, around the same place Poppy used to live in utero before I brought her into the world then abandoned her to a stranger.

Further away, further.

How am I going to do this?

Every day.

And further.

I look out of the window at suburban Cheshire stations with commuters clutching coffee in flasks brought from home. It is May, with its telltale juxtaposition of boots and sandals, parkas and bare arms. T-shirts hang out with roll-necks, newly waxed legs and thick socks stand side by side on the platform. It is too early to know what the day will bring so everybody is guessing, balancing weather apps with the chill they still feel and the comfort they need when they’re craving two more hours’ sleep.

I stare at them. That one, who thinks everyone wants to listen to his TV show out loud. That one, falling asleep standing up. I wonder, whether they have bare legs or jumpers or boots or visible toenails, if anyone is feeling close to how I feel this morning.

Slowly, the tiny stations make way for the edge of the city. The flasks are replaced with branded coffee cups and the platforms are crammed full, the people younger, cooler, edgier. Like my colleagues at New Social, one of the city’s biggest digital marketing agencies. I glance at my trainers, doubtful now about the brand.

Everyone moves more urgently here. My heart starts racing watching it all and I have the edge of a headache. I used to be comfortable at the heart of this picture; pushing past, boots stomping at pace, latte aloft, tut tut tutting if you strayed into my path. Now I feel distant from it all. Maternity leave days have required me to get to one place at 10.30 a.m. and make small talk while singing nursery rhymes. We spoke slowly, the other mums and I, trying to drag out our coffees because otherwise what would we do for the rest of the day? We had tried to kill – stake out and murder – time so that it could be the evening, when husbands would be home and wine would be poured and we would feel, for that tiny window, like the old us.

‘That was my shoulder,’ hisses the woman next to me at a man who had passed by in the aisle. She could have been me, I think. Not so long ago. ‘City wankers.’

She looks at me in solidarity but I feel nervous of her wrath and also like a fraud. This doesn’t feel like my world any longer. Doesn’t she know that I am normally still in my pyjamas around now, singing ‘Row Row Row Your Boat’ or hanging up row after row of tiny socks while a child sleeps? I’m not a real commuter, I think. If only you knew.

A surge of anxiety pulses as I think about how in an hour or so, I will be expected to do my job as Digital Marketing Manager. To be current in a sea of twenty-somethings. To run meetings. To dash out of the office to eat pancakes for brunch with a client.

I will be expected to be the straight-to-the-point ‘this creative isn’t working for me, we need another option for first thing tomorrow’ version of me that I am not sure hasn’t been written over with toddler songs and baby babble. With photographing my turmeric latte for Cheshire Mama’s Instagram and calling that ‘work’.

I feel a sensation in my stomach akin to a bad hangover.

Oh, Poppy. My best mate for the last year. I’ve never spent as much time with anyone as I do with her, with those long walks in her pram, us dancing round the room to our songs.

Just then my phone beeps and I leap on it because, almost definitely, it’s a message telling me that Poppy had escaped out of Ronnie’s back garden or is in an ambulance with a life-threatening condition, probably brought on by the trauma of being left behind by her mum.

But it’s just Emma.

She checked in last night too, even as she dashed from putting her son to bed to her weekly Slimming World meeting. I was what she had done with her spare thirty seconds and I felt touched. And guilty, because sometimes I think I don’t make enough effort with Emma. But I want to speed her up, and tell her to speak up. She gets lost, even in our small crowd.

Gd luck today S, her message says. You’re going to smash it!!!

I smile, picturing Emma bursting in to baby music class – where I’m normally headed on Monday mornings too – muttering apologies for her tardiness. Emma is ten minutes late for whatever she does.

I smile at the thought of them all, my mum friends.

Emma is thirty-five, only a few months older than me, and sometimes I forget that she has a husband. He doesn’t come up often but when he does he sounds uninvolved and removed from her and her baby’s life.

Our virtually teenage (fine, twenty-nine-year-old) friend Asha messaged this morning at 5 a.m., up early to call her sister in Melbourne. Asha is tiny, less than five foot. She likes to question things and research them and come back to you when she has firmed up her arguments. She would never fight a cause unless she was an encyclopaedia on the subject. Even after wine.

And finally there was Cora, communicating as always via a list of her favourite emojis, sent while I was at Ronnie’s. Cora, unlike Emma, likes to do everything fast, but especially talking, which she does tripping over her own thoughts, flitting to a different point, pulling a compact out of her bag to check her eyelashes but still speaking, then asking you quickly if her hair looks okay while also sending a text. Cora is a whirlwind; the kind of WAG I thought I might run a mile from when I first saw her stomp in in giant heels and faux fur to our antenatal class.

The four of us met last year, when our babies protruded from our middles. When we sat in a room feeling increasingly panicked about things we hadn’t bought, learned or read, and to plan for a birth that could never be planned for.

Emma and Cora sat together on the parents’ evening-style chairs, hands on bumps, already friends. While Ed and I came together, they massaged each other’s backs with tennis balls instead. ‘My other half’s at work,’ Cora said. Then she tipped her head in Emma’s direction. ‘Hers just isn’t into this whole thing.’ Then she’d rolled her eyes, while Emma’s cheeks reddened.

‘You know each other already?’ I asked, in week one.

Everybody round Sowerton – where I had lived for less than a year – seemed to know each other.

My heart sank. I had been hopeful for a fellow ex-city dweller to find some things in common with.

But Cora nodded.

‘Em was in South Wales when she was a kid but after that, we both grew up round here, hon,’ Cora told me, leaning into Emma. ‘Same school, the lot. We’ve been mates for years.’

Even at first impressions they were a wonky juxtaposition. I looked at Emma, the pretty blonde with chubby cheeks who blushed when I spoke to her and couldn’t meet eye contact. And then at Cora, who’d told me that her wedding cost £60,000 and she has a nanny ‘just to help out’ about ten minutes after meeting me.

I suspect it worked for Cora like those types of uneven friendships always do. She dominated and talked; Emma listened. Emma’s stories would never compete with her tales of Hunter, her WAG past. Like having a therapist, for free. And for Emma perhaps Cora made her life easier, found the baby groups they should go to, made the friends on her behalf, formed her life then sent her out an invite for it.

‘You’ve not been in Sowerton long, I take it?’ asked Cora.

I nodded. ‘I’m from Manchester really. Chorlton. I work in town.’

It seemed important that they knew. That they didn’t think I was just … you know, Sowerton.

But Cora was nonplussed, checking her lipstick in a mirror, nodding vaguely.

‘Is it just us three?’ I asked our teacher, Cath, and she looked at her notes.

‘One more starting next week but that’s it,’ she confirmed. ‘We don’t get big classes round here. Not like in your cities.’

She nodded at me.

And I sat back and hoped that mystery mum number four brought some balance. Or wasn’t already mates with everyone else, at least.

Then in week two, as I swigged Gaviscon from a bottle and Emma got out an emergency KitKat, Asha arrived, little and serious and dressed for the gym with a notebook. Her husband Aidan held her hand.

‘Sorry we missed last week,’ she said. ‘We were visiting family.’

I heard her London accent.

It wasn’t Manchester nostalgia, but it would do. I’d cling to a city transplant like a life raft.

‘Aidan grew up round here,’ Asha said when she introduced herself to the group, nodding towards her husband and I was glad to see another man too, for Ed. I smiled at Aidan. ‘Got me with the house prices, obviously. It’s been about a year now.’

Cora wasn’t listening.

‘Let’s add your number to the group chat,’ she said, brusque; there was no option. But Asha nodded happily, squeezing her husband’s hand. This is what we’d all come for, after all. We could learn to change a nappy from Google; it was the mates we were paying for.

So we swapped numbers and arranged, after our babies were born like painful dominoes, one after the other in the space of one week, to meet up.

And we did. We had the same desire to pour the caffeine we hadn’t been allowed for months and now needed ferociously into our veins and so it became a regular thing, easy, us all heading for lattes, meet-ups, soft play as the babies got older. New baby lives curated by Cora, who shoved cards for her cupcake business into our hands, friended us on Facebook, asked questions, made sure our friendship gathered pace. And checking in too, after jabs, if our babies were sick, when we went back to work.

I lean back against the train seat and sigh.

My NCT friends haven’t been around long but they get it. They understand how my insides feel today. This isn’t theoretical to them, it’s close. Some have been there, some will be there, some just know how it would feel to be there because they feel a version of it when they lose sight of their child for a second at soft play, or drive away as they wave at the window at grandparents’.

A full set of messages from my mum crew but absolutely nothing, I realise, from Ed. To ask how Poppy settled in, or how I’m coping.

He’s so busy at work today, I reason. Give him a break.

Instead I reply to my mum group chat.

I can’t stop sobbing, I type. I feel awful. I hate this.

It’s much more exposed than I usually am. Usually, I prefer to put on a together front. I’m told with that resting bitch face it can seem a bit cold, a bit superior. But at least people don’t think I’m weak. At least people don’t pity me. I am struggling to react normally to anything today though.

Typing quickly as I’m at BMT, writes Emma. Baby music time. Everything has an acronym when you’re a parent. There’s no time for full words.

Don’t do that! I reply. I feel terrible, distracting her from one of her days off with Seth.

It’s fine, whole class is car crash, she replies. Everyone’s on phone. But P will be having the time of her life! Ronnie is great. In a week this will feel normal. It’s just today that’s weird. Firsts are always weird.

Thank you, I reply. Emma’s emotional intelligence on messages is special. I must make more effort to chat to her as much in person.

The train pulls into the station and I shove my phone in my bag, take a deep breath and join the throng to step off.

Thanks to Emma, I am feeling ten per cent less likely to sprint back to the countryside to sling Poppy over my shoulder and leave work forever.

And somewhere under the rubbish tip of anxiety, I realise, there is a tiny bag of something approaching excitement. I will drink a mint tea today at my desk, slowly instead of chucking coffee down my throat like a pill. I will go into a meeting where people will respect me and somebody junior will be a tiny bit intimidated by me and ask me questions to which I will – hopefully – know the answers. I will reapply lipstick in the bathroom because I will always have thirty seconds to spare and hands that have no other responsibilities to tend to.

I will eat real food, not a child’s cold leftover sticky pasta shoved in as I stack an overfilled dishwasher. I will go to shops on my lunch break and make small talk that isn’t about weaning but about a date somebody went on and the film they saw, or the risotto one of the social media managers ate on a much-Instagrammed break in Puglia.

There were pluses, weren’t there. I needed to hold on to them tightly today.

I make a mental note to message the NCT girls too and tell them what a difference their support made this morning. But the message never gets sent; the sentiment never gets shared. Because it’s less than an hour later that something blasts into my world that ruins my relationships, my life and my mind and which I am not sure I can ever find a way back from.

2
Scarlett

4 May

My feet ache as I walk into my building; they have had a chilled-out time on their year-long commuting break and they are mad as hell about getting back to the grindstone.

‘Scarlett!’ says our giant Aussie Charlie on reception as I walk through the revolving door. ‘First day back?’

I nod, bouncing from one foot to the other and unable to keep still with nerves.

‘How’s the baby?’ he says, standing up to high-five me. ‘Congrats. I’ve got three. You’ve got fun ahead.’

‘Thanks, Charlie,’ I reply.

I’m twitchy. Now I’m back at work, I want to be back at work.

‘Get on, yep, get on.’ He nods. ‘Get there on time so you can get out for the nursery pick-up, right? All different now. Go!’

He shoos me towards the lift and I dig out my pass, call it and wait. In a few minutes I will see Felicity and the thought calms me. Felicity is my boss but also my mate. Felicity came to my baby shower; I went on her hen do. She’ll talk me through what’s happened in the last year, give me the low-down on the new people and we’ll drink coffee and eat the fancy donuts and everything will be easier because of our relationship. And because of the donuts. Calm, Scarlett. This will be okay.

The lift opens and I catch sight of one of the finance guys, Jared, walking past. I know everyone in this building – it’s the best and worst thing about a business that values team-building away days and boozy Friday lunches highly – but Jared a little better than most; Ed was in his department when he used to work here.

That’s how we met, Ed and I, at work, or through both spending lunchtimes in the gym next door.

On rare Manchester sunny days, we’d meet outside and go for a run together instead, sprinting the last one hundred metres, competitive with each other. Then Ed got offered a job at another company and took it, both of us thinking that was probably sensible anyway, now we were spending most nights at each other’s flats. Jared got promoted. He and Ed kept in touch, meet for a pint regularly. But as I wave at him from the lift, Jared keeps his head down. Mustn’t have seen me.

Eventually we get to my floor and I step out, straight into a waiting Felicity.

I fling my arms around her even while I know it is unprofessional.

‘Flick!’ I exclaim, relieved, and she hugs me back hard.

‘Good to see you,’ she says and I pull out and look at her.

‘You look amazing,’ I say because this, for unknown reasons, is how you reacquaint with female friends. I love your earrings. Your shoes are hot. Where’s that lipstick from? Et cetera, et cetera. Start with the pawing of the new coat and the stroking of the cashmere, then you’re ready to move on to real subjects.

‘Nice shirt,’ I add. ‘And thanks for the welcome committee.’

She smiles but it’s close-mouthed.

‘Come with me,’ she says. ‘There’s something I need to talk to you about. We’ll grab a boardroom.’

The goose bumps are worse than the ones I had without a coat in Sowerton this morning. A boardroom means we need privacy; our office is open-plan. So what is it? Redundancy? Can they do that when I’m on maternity leave? Or is that the point – I’m not any more, so they can?

But I can’t ask because Flick is marching off now, past the beanbags, towards the room I presume she has booked, a hand on my lower back to guide me there too. I quickstep to keep up, new trainers threatening blisters.

On the way we pass my colleagues, ten or twenty of them.

‘Sara!’ I say, excited to see a long-term desk buddy. But Sara just smiles awkwardly and ducks her head.

Freddie doesn’t look up at all.

Sanjeeta rummages in a drawer.

I think about Jared.

Something odd is happening.

‘Is the company folding?’ I whisper to Flick, half-laughing. ‘Why is everyone being strange?’

She doesn’t answer but ushers me into the room and shuts the door, flicking on the lock.

The trainer situation dictates that I sit down immediately. Flick stays standing.

‘Firstly,’ she says. ‘Welcome back.’

She gives me the only genuine smile I’ve seen since I walked in here. ‘It’s lovely to see you. I’m sorry I’ve not made it over in a few months.’

I look away awkwardly. She visited when Poppy was small. It was about nine months ago. She was one of my closest friends.

‘Well, firstly too it’s nice to be back,’ I say. ‘But I think we had better get to secondly. There’s a disconcerting vibe in here?’

Flick nods, seriously.

And then she does sit down, and jiggles her mouse to make her computer come alive.

She clicks onto something, then looks at me.

‘I need you to steel yourself here, Scarlett,’ she says.

My stomach lurches. Redundancy, then. I think about the size of our mortgage and regret following Ed’s lead despite my nerves and maxing ourselves out on our four-bed pretty listed building on the winding country road in our idyllic Cheshire village. How long will it take me to find something else? How big will my pay-off be?

‘Go on,’ I say, needing the conclusion as I try to do sums with no facts.

She sighs. Clicks again.

‘I was sent a link to this in the early hours of this morning by somebody I don’t know,’ says my friend, my boss. ‘And so was everybody else on the team.’

I nod.

‘Right,’ I say, searching her face for clues about where this is going. But Felicity cannot meet my eyes.

‘It’s a sex tape,’ she says.

My eyebrows shoot up. Jesus. That explains why everyone is in a strange mood; my return isn’t the headline this morning. A sex tape!

‘Whoa,’ I say. ‘Do you know why you were sent that?’

Flick doesn’t say anything else. Instead she wipes her dark-rimmed glasses on her expensive blue silk shirt to – I’m sure – try and steady hands I notice are shaking.

But then she composes herself.

‘I didn’t open it at first because it was an unknown link. But I came in early and asked IT to take a look at it, because of the title.’

I nod. Yep. We are always being told to be careful what we open. Makes sense.

Flick bows her head, as if in prayer.

‘I did send a memo to everybody, to tell them not to open it,’ she says, looking tortured. ‘I tried to act, as fast as I could. But it wasn’t fast enough, evidently. They’d either already looked or they were too curious and ignored me.’

I reach a hand to her then.

‘It’s okay,’ I say. ‘It’s not your fault. They shouldn’t have done that if you told them not to look at it.’

Would I have looked, though, I wonder? A sex tape isn’t normal Monday morning fodder.

Flick’s prayer ends and she looks at me.

‘Scarlett,’ she says. ‘The video clip was titled with your name. You’re in it. It’s your sex tape. You and … two men.’

I laugh at first, in disbelief.

‘That’s impossible,’ I say.

But then I look at her screen, from a chair where I usually sit with a cup of coffee in my hand looking at the Google Analytics and I freeze with a memory of something that happened in a different time, to a different me.

Fuck.

Sitting in the chair next to my boss, I am still and I am ice. Flick’s hand is hovering over a video clip.

‘I can show you, if you want me to, but I understand if not,’ she says quietly.

Perhaps if she weren’t my friend, or if she were a man, it would be different. But something compels me to watch. I lean forward and click play myself.

Flick stands up to pull the blind down.

I stare at the movements on the screen and at the three naked bodies – one of which is my own – having sex with each other, in various shapes and combinations.

Fuck.

I wrap my arms around myself and try and hold the parts of me together.

My head throbs, my vision blurs.

Felicity, moving back towards me, looks alarmed.

She tries to touch me but I shake her off.

‘Let me contact medical,’ she says, concerned.

We work in a large building, with lots of other creative companies. There is a nurse in a small room on the second floor. It’s a forward-thinking place to work. Good mental health is a key focus so he would get me a cup of tea and ask if I need the in-house counselling service phone number for a referral and I would sit there and reply with what? That it’s not too many working hours that’s the problem here, but the fact I just sat in a boardroom with my boss and watched myself have sex.

I shake my head.

‘No medical,’ I manage. ‘I just need a minute.’

She nods.

I know it happened. I do remember it, somewhere in the recesses of my mind.

Felicity has turned the sound off on the video, or it doesn’t have sound, but for whichever one of those is true, I am grateful.

One long minute later I look back at my boss’s bowed head. She is still wiping.

I continue to sit, my heart feeling like it could injure me with its drumming; migraine kicking in. My back is sweating like I have just completed one of the ten marathons I have run in my lifetime. My face is hot like I’ve opened the oven on a bubbling lasagne – ready-made, knowing me – and peered right inside.

‘It was posted to a website but they sent the video link too,’ Felicity says, under her breath.

So it’s not just an email to be deleted but this video is accessible to whoever, whenever. For those people to laugh at me or be turned on by me or to use me for whatever they need.

My eyes, which sting with the urge to weep like a toddler who doesn’t want to share, can’t take themselves off the video.

My hands and my legs shake harder, deeper.

It was pointless, I think, to try and reinvent myself as I look at the woman on the screen. Same arms, same legs, same me.

You attempt so hard to be something, to leave something behind but image is fragile and now my shiny new one is on the floor.

Can someone pop in to sweep it up? You’ve left a shard in the corner. That’s it, all gone now.

The video finally stops.

‘Stay,’ says Felicity weakly, as I stand up to leave. ‘Let’s talk this through.’

But I laugh and she dips her head. Because we both know that what she is saying is preposterous. How can I put either of us through that? What would ‘that’ even involve?

The only option here is surely to run, run, run as fast as I can.

I fight the urge to throw up.

Even if some people didn’t open it without the private IT favours Flick asked for, they would try the link later, at home; less wary, too curious.

To walk to the lift I have to walk past all of them, the colleagues that now know what you would get if you peeled back every single item of clothing that I am wearing.

It feels like that’s exactly what has happened.

3
Scarlett

4 May

Breathe.

Remember to breathe.

I feel discussed and disgust and I am outside the office, calling Ed and sobbing hard as I walk towards the train station.

Ed answers on the first ring and I know the second he says hello.

‘I was about to call you,’ he says. He sounds altered, in the way you do when the seismic stuff happens.

‘They sent it to you,’ I say, stopping still on the street amongst angry shoppers and people running late for work who have to swerve around me.

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘You know then. Shit, Scarlett.’

We are silent, in shock.

When he speaks next, it’s quieter.

‘Who else was it sent to?’ he asks.

‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘You’re the first person I’ve called, obviously. But my work colleagues, for starters. I’ve just come out of a room with Flick. Can you leave work and meet me at home?’

‘Yeah of course,’ he says. ‘I’ll leave now.’

He’ll get home sooner than me from his office in Warrington, only half an hour from Sowerton.

‘I’m sorry,’ I say, guilty at bringing this into our life. ‘I know you’re busy in work today.’

He doesn’t reply.

‘See you soon,’ he says, then hangs up.

Is that it? I think. No I love you. No We’ll get through this.

Wait until you get home, Scarlett, I think. He probably just wants to see me face to face. It’s not easy to get into this without being in the same room.

On my phone, I am googling lawyers as I walk to the station, bumping into angry people who curse at me.

‘Look where you’re bloody going, love,’ says a city type in a too-small suit.

I stare at him blankly; no capacity to reply.

Finally I arrive at the station and on the platform fire off five emails to different law firms.

I am desperate to pick up the phone to them to speed this along but how can I have this conversation next to a mum with her toddler or the retirees excited about their day trip for a walk and a fish and chip lunch?

A minute after I board the train, one of the lawyers pings back. I have an appointment next week.

Okay. Okay. I’m doing something at least. I’m taking action.

I look out of the window and try now to calm down slightly, to exhale.

Then my phone rings.

It’s one of my closest friends, Martha, and so I pick up, hoping for the comfort of her voice.

‘Hey,’ I say. ‘I’m on a train so I might cut out. Did you speak to Flick?’

I met Martha when she worked at our company. She and Felicity are still close too.

‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘I did. Fuck I’m so sorry, Scarlett.’

I sigh. ‘Thanks. Just trying to sort out a lawyer now.’

There’s a beat of silence that feels odd when there should be a flurry of reassurance and solidarity and ‘Oh, Scarlett, this is awful, what can I do to help?’ and the like.

‘Martha?’

‘Scarlett, I’m sorry. It was sent to me too.’

My phone beeps then and I glance at it while Martha is on the line. Because I have a horrible, desperate feeling. It’s a text from a friend asking me to call her when I’m free. Then another. Followed by a message telling me I have a voicemail.

From my dad.

It’s gone everywhere. To everyone. Or everyone, at least, who matters to me.

My dad.

I gag.

‘Scarlett? You still there?’

‘Martha, I’m going to have to call you back,’ I say. ‘Talk later.’

And I sink into the chair and sob, avoiding listening to my dad’s voicemail and hoping, desperately, that he is phoning about something else.

Oh, to be this exposed.

My phone is no longer the mind-numbing comfort it was on the way in. Instead it’s a grenade.

I search my ex Ollie’s name on Facebook. I blush when I think about why I’m starting with him, not the other man in the video, Mitch. Because the reason is that I don’t know Mitch’s full name.

How much will everybody judge me? I’m even judging myself.

Was Mitch a nickname? It’s not a very good one, especially not for a DJ. A surname, then? Part of a surname?

I know this is out of the blue, I type to Ollie but think – is it? Is it? Not if you uploaded and sent that video, it isn’t.

But I need to speak to you, urgently. Please get back to me ASAP.

No pleasantries; no context.

Another friend tries to phone me. I let it ring out. The bald man in the tie across the aisle glances at me, his face red with irritation.

I would turn my phone off and throw it out of the window, I think, if it weren’t for my daughter crawling around a stranger’s house and needing me.

The man looks at me again, disapproving. I stare back at him. Why is he going home early? Feeling sick? Forgotten his laptop? Whatever it is, I think, you are having a better day than me. You are reading your newspaper and grimacing at others. This is not, for you, one of those days that alter lives.

I push my fingers into my temples, terrible headache overwhelming me.

And then I think Poppy.

I contemplate gruesome images of her as a teenager, being shown or told about the video by crude classmates.

The feeling inside becomes an ache. The gag threatens to go further. The bald man turns away.

Knowing I can’t avoid it forever, I listen to the voicemail from my dad.

‘Love,’ it says, and he sounds like he is delivering news of death. ‘I’ve been sent something awful. Phone me when you have a minute.’

The sobs come harder and the man across the aisle softens, offers me a tissue. I shake my head no and bury it in my hands.

My phone beeps. Ollie.

Bloody hell. Bloody hell. Scarlett! Okay. Yes, let’s meet up. When?

It takes three attempts to type my reply with trembling hands.

Tomorrow? I say.

Away for work, comes the reply. Day after?

We agree to meet at a pub in Shropshire, in between me in Cheshire and him in – apparently now – Birmingham.

Can you tell me what this is about? he says once the meet-up is sorted. I’m married.

Yes, of course – if he didn’t do it, that is how it sounds.

I’m not trying to come on to you, I type, cringing for all of the nearly middle-aged married people who are coming on to past loves, right now. I’m married too. Happily, thanks.

I think about telling him that I don’t have a twelve-year-old that I haven’t mentioned either, but decide it can’t hurt for him to wonder. Disarming him could make sure he doesn’t lie. And make sure too that he comes, shows up, and sits in front of me to answer my questions. My question.

Explain when I see you, I reply quickly.

I stare at the screen and at his name, popping up over and over. The oddness that a collection of letters can make me react so strongly by association; I’ll never see a message ping in from Ollie and not be twenty-one and besotted and obsessed with every word he ever said to me. Hairs on my arms stand up straight and tingle.

For God’s sake, Scarlett, this man might have ruined your life. Time for the rose-tinted youth glasses to come off.

An hour later, I walk into our large, open-plan kitchen and see Ed standing in the corner by the window like he is trying to disappear into the exposed bricks.

‘Oh, Scarlett.’

He looks at me.

I stop where I enter the room.

I can’t go to him; I am too ashamed.

He doesn’t come to me.

He doesn’t speak.

I cry and he doesn’t comfort me. He is pacing.

‘Have you contacted these men?’

He looks like he might throw up.

‘I’m meeting my ex in two days,’ I say. ‘Hopefully he can put me in touch with …’ I trail off. Somehow, this seems less real without names.

‘Have you contacted a lawyer?’ he asks, moving again, hand to his forehead. ‘You need to get this taken down. Fast.’

I nod my head, chastised. ‘Appointment next week,’ I say, pleased to please.

‘I’ll find you something sooner,’ he says, taking his phone out of his pocket. He starts scrolling, searching. ‘That video has got to come down. Now. For fuck’s sake. Why would they do this to you?’

He looks at me. Sighs.

‘Scarlett, why didn’t you tell me this had happened?’

I flush. ‘I did!’ I protest. ‘When we first got together and we were drunk at that wedding in Spain. I told you that Ollie and I had a threesome.’

Something flashes across his face. ‘You told me you … I thought … fuck, Scarlett, I assumed it was with another girl, not a guy.’

I look at him.

‘Is that different?’ I ask, frowning.

‘Of course it’s different, Scarlett,’ he mutters.

It was okay when he thought it was something a seventeen-year-old boy might fantasise about. But when the picture’s less socially acceptable, I’m slut-shamed by my husband.

My sobs come harder.

‘How am I going to go back to work?’ I cry. ‘My colleagues have seen it.’

His phone beeps and he reads the message.

He slams his hand on the kitchen table.

‘What now?’

‘My parents,’ he says, bleak. ‘My parents have been sent the video too.’

His phone starts to ring.

He punches the wall this time, just to the left of our large framed wedding picture.

‘And by the looks of that call, Liam too.’

His older brother. I cry harder then, because the breadth of this is unbearable. How can this be happening to me? I’m not a celebrity – not unless you count a very low level of attention that I get from Cheshire Mama and I don’t – and not a controversial figure.

My skin is smarting in desperation of how much I long for my husband to hug me but I know he won’t. He’s not in a hugging kind of mood. Ed gets like this sometimes, when he’s focused on something practical. He can’t step outside it to the emotional.

I look at him, and suspect that however I get over this, I will have to get over it by myself.

‘I’ll go and get Poppy,’ he says.

And it’s only then that I think about Ronnie, my daughter’s childminder, and if she has been included in this circle around my life that has seen the video. How can I ever ask, as babies roam around and Peppa Pig toys go flying and the picture is such innocence?

I nod.

Even though it is too early for pick-up and Ronnie will ask questions, I let Ed walk away because I know he needs to move, away from me. And because I do not want to have to beg him to come back.

Anon

She’s alpha.

That’s the first thing I think when I meet Scarlett.

I don’t think I’ve ever thought before about the definition of an alpha person but when she stands in front of me, rubbing that baby bump, it is the only word in my mind and it shouts itself, loud.

Alpha.

Alpha.

Alpha.

Scarlett is not necessarily the loudest in the room, but she is the most comfortable in her own skin. Sitting back. Appraising the situation. Cringing, ever so slightly, when you say something she deems stupid before swooping in to put you right.

Tall but not the sort of tall that means older relatives suggest she wears flats to make men feel more at ease.

‘Good tall,’ people say, nodding approvingly.

The victim bit? Give me a break. It’s hard to swallow when you’ve seen the way Scarlett walks into a room, presuming all eyes are on her and very happy with that.

When Scarlett’s daughter was born and she went on maternity leave, she wanted to keep herself busy so instead of eating fifteen biscuits at a time in front of bad daytime TV, she started Cheshire Mama, a painfully smug parenting blog. She uses any window she can to shoehorn a mention of Cheshire Mama because her blog makes her feel special; a local celebrity. Scarlett likes that.

Even though there are thousands of parenting blogs already, millions, Cheshire Mama is successful. It would be; Scarlett’s kid’s cute and her mum will happily flog those pudgy legs and hair that looks like it was cut in a pixie for a free designer changing bag. Often her husband features too. Beautiful, over six foot and positioned with the kid next to a pumpkin, a Christmas tree, a baby lamb, a swimming pool; insert as appropriate for the season.

It’s unbearable.

Scarlett’s child has the coolest buggy, and her shoulder has the coolest bag, and her kitchen has the coolest coffee machine. It sits right there, see, on top of the coolest kitchen island. They plant vegetables together in their wellies, the Salloways, but only so they can pose for the picture, a snap for a thousand hashtags.

I see her smugness when I stand with Scarlett in her kitchen. As I watch her, she is barefoot, pink toenails, picking up the coffee cup and flicking on the radio.

I smile at her, tell her I love this song.

Scarlett is pretty. Slim. God, she even has this thick, glossy hair when everyone else’s is falling out like it does after you have a baby. If she’s casual – often, actually – it’s in a way that doesn’t apologise for itself. When it rains on her dark brown bob she shoves it in an up-do that looks good without a slide or even a mirror.

It’s not that she is the fanciest – that’s sort of the point. She’s just … well, alpha.

Scarlett moved round here a few years ago, relocating from central Manchester. When you need a restaurant recommendation in the city, Scarlett knows the only three places you should go this year. Watch out if you suggest somewhere else; that face she pulls will make you want to drown yourself in her turmeric bloody latte.

We all know that Scarlett thinks she’s better than people without even having to try, and that irks. It irritates. It enrages.

4
Scarlett

5 May

The next day Poppy is with Ronnie, and Ed and I are in the waiting room of a lawyer’s office in central Manchester. My phone beeps.

How’s work going? asks Asha on our group chat. Sending loads of positive vibes.

They don’t know.

The only people close to me that haven’t been sent the video, as far as I can tell, are my mum friends.

Maybe they are new enough in my life that whoever did this doesn’t know about our closeness; doesn’t know they are part of my inner circle. Maybe there’s one area of my life in which I can take a break from this. If there is, I want to keep it protected; keep it safe.

So I don’t say a word. Or reply at all. I put my phone on Do Not Disturb and turn to Ed.

‘I wish the lawyer was a woman,’ I whisper, as we sit alone in the waiting room.

He looks up from his phone.

‘Why would that matter, Scarlett?’ he bristles. ‘The important thing is getting this done, as soon as is humanly possible. Jesus. Priorities.’

He goes back to his email.

I sigh and look down.

I have worn a high neckline today and a long, formless skirt to negate as much as possible of the image that I am convinced this lawyer has already formed of me based on what he knows from our phone call. When I gave the woman on reception my name, I try to mute my broad Manchester accent and sound like I grew up in Kent. Or at least the edge of Cheshire.

I open my mouth to explain the difference between talking to a woman about my sexual past versus a man and of knowing that they have seen my body but close it again when I realise there is no point. We’re here now and Ed’s right. We need to just get this done.

‘Scarlett Salloway?’ asks a short man in his fifties. He pumps Ed’s hand and then mine and leads us through to an office.

‘Can I offer you something to drink?’ he says. ‘Tea? Coffee?’

We both shake our heads, eager to get on. Our hands are clasped to each other’s.

‘Okay, thanks for explaining to me on the phone what’s happened,’ says Mr White. He looks at his screen.

‘We just appreciate you seeing us so quickly,’ says Ed.

‘Handy cancellation,’ he says. ‘So here’s the situation.’

I’m glad he’s brusque, at this hourly rate brusque is ideal. And I really don’t want to go over the whole story again.

‘You can report this to the police, but that would make whoever has done this alert to being investigated, which means evidence could be deleted or destroyed.

‘So first, I would suggest that you try to obtain strong evidence on who did this – and I’m presuming in this situation you have a good guess – yourself.’

I nod.

‘I’m meeting Ollie – the man, one of the men – tomorrow,’ I say.

Ed’s whole body cringes next to me. His fingers loosen in mine.

‘And the other?’ asks Mr White.

I try again to remember Mitch’s proper name.

‘Working on it,’ I mutter, head low, mood lower.

‘And what about in terms of getting it down?’ asks Ed, letting go of my hand altogether and leaning forwards. I sit beside him, meek, playing with my wedding ring.

‘Yes.’ Mr White nods. ‘Obviously important. Must be traumatic for you and your wife and everyone close to you.’

I think about my dad. I still haven’t called him back, despite his multiple attempts to get through to me. Ed has his head bowed. I think of his parents, and how eventually I’ll have to see them too.

‘What you want to do is contact the operators of the website that it’s on directly,’ he says. ‘Some will remove it, some won’t on the basis of freedom of speech.’

I see my legs begin to shake beneath my skirt.

‘What if this one won’t?’ I ask. ‘What then?’

‘Well, it’s a more complicated process but you can make an application on the basis of privacy law. You can also make an application to Google to delist all videos from search results. It’ll be easier if it’s a UK website operator.’

Ed is nodding seriously.

‘There’s only one,’ I say. ‘That I know of.’

Mr White nods, matter-of-fact.

‘Yep and hopefully it’ll stay that way but don’t be surprised if it pops up elsewhere,’ he says. ‘If that happens you’ll just have to go to them individually.’

Ed looks at me, checks I’m getting it all. I nod but I’m shaking harder now. More websites. The video spreading wider. Further. It hadn’t even crossed my mind.

‘So you will sort this?’ Ed says, turning back to Mr White. ‘One way or another?’

‘Yes,’ says Mr White. ‘It may take time but there is only one video. In many cases there are hundreds, posted to different websites. This should be simple. The most important thing though is finding out who did it.’

I nod at Ed and at Mr White and think that the situations aren’t too different, right now and in the video.

Me, with two men, longing to be anywhere but here.

We leave then, but not before Mr White hands me a glass of water, concerned that I look faint.

5
Scarlett

6 May

Early Noughties house music plays loudly in the car and the window is down. My head doesn’t nod rhythmically, automatic, like it would normally do. This has taken even that away from me. Shocked my urge to dance into stasis.

I push my sunglasses up a touch on my nose. Notice that the guy in the car next to me is staring.

You think I’m somebody else, I think. You think I am Scarlett 1.0, the girl in the video. Ollie’s ‘bird’, party hard, probably high, definitely drunk, life and soul. I won’t sleep with your boyfriend but I’ll probably flirt with him. If you have a proper job, I’ll roll my eyes and call you a sell-out.

I am doing it.

I am on my way to meet Ollie.

I shove my hand in a giant bag of Haribo that I bought at a petrol station earlier in the journey and shovel them into my mouth.

We met, Ollie and I, when we were both twenty. I worked in a pub; he drank in the pub. I had spent the years since my pre-teens careering through life, unloved, unloving. My dad, at capacity with his young child, believed me when I said I was fine and didn’t push me when I turned down invites to come for minty lamb or a cup of tea or to build a sandcastle with my sister as we shivered on the beach in Blackpool.

I had friends. But they were really drug dealers or party buddies.

I got into university but I partied too hard and I fucked up my degree and so I worked at the pub full time instead of part time and shrugged my shoulders and partied harder. Got kicked out of my flat for not paying my rent. Moved into what I suppose was called a squat. Partied even harder. Took the drugs you aren’t supposed to take. Did the stuff you aren’t supposed to do.

At the pub there were lock-ins. There was a lot of haziness. But in the middle of the haziness, I met Ollie and wanted to be lucid to impress him and to remember being with him and he brought me back from the brink. From the cracks on the edge of society that in retrospect, I had already started to disappear down.

‘Scarlett, Scarlett, there is no one like Scarlett,’ he would sing to me as we danced on the streets, at bus stops, bars, wherever we were. We were together for three years of dancing when he stroked my face, held me close and where sometimes I would cry out of nowhere because I was happy, for the first time in years, years, years.

Ollie and I moved for the same music and it was a uniting factor, but it was music that even though I had taken it down a notch, still went with being drunk, high, out of it.

We were young enough to handle that though. Just. We weren’t old enough to have to analyse why we got so out of it, or consider our behaviour as destructive. We didn’t see therapists or make up for it at the weekend with a fast day. Chaos was just what you did until something happened that stopped you being chaotic.

And when, twenty-three and in shock, I told Ollie one day that that vomiting episode hadn’t been a hangover but a baby, we grinned at each other. Because we had our reason to stop being chaotic.

It wasn’t on the script but we loved that scene. We would do this.

He kissed my hair and whispered to me: ‘Thank you.’

‘They’ll be funny,’ he said, grinning like I’d never seen him grin. ‘Like you. They’ll be funny and beautiful and confident and a big adventurer, just like you, Scarlett Scarlett Scarlett.’

Ollie started looking for a proper job, and he thrived with the purpose. I stopped drinking and getting high. Until our baby was born too early and didn’t make it and then I drank more, took more, pushed the boundaries and tried desperately to rewrite myself back into the party girl I was before, not the mum I had been planning to be.

I wanted to be out every night.

I wanted to try this club, and that club.

I wanted to submerge myself back in that world so that I could pretend I had never left it, even in my head, and maybe that would work; something had to, God it had to.

Because I wanted to die, really.

I wanted to have the threesome because a threesome seemed like the opposite of planning to be parents. Debauched. Irresponsible. Maybe it would be the thing that worked.

‘Really?’ said Ollie, concerned as I whispered it to him late one night on a dance floor.

‘Yes! Yes! Why not?’ I said, kissing his face, whirling him around the club.

‘It will be fun! An adventure! You always say I like adventures!’ I slurred. Except normally they involved impromptu flights to foreign music festivals or a big night out on a Monday. This was left-field.

But we could reclaim our messy young lives. Fully see off these sensible nearly-parents we had turned into. Live, so that the alternative stopped sidling into my head.

‘I don’t think it’s a good idea, Scarlett,’ he said, soft in my ear.

‘We’ve been together for three years,’ I told him. ‘We don’t want to get old and boring.’

That was exactly what we had wanted to get.

But in the absence of that, this.

Ollie looked concerned.

‘But now?’ he said, glancing down my so recently pregnant body. ‘Now?’

Now. Exactly now. That was the point.

And I snapped at him that just because I wasn’t at my skinniest, didn’t mean that our friend’s mate Mitch didn’t want to sleep with me.

‘Mitch made that clear actually,’ I said, sullen.

‘That’s not what I meant, Scarlett,’ said Ollie, sadly. ‘I meant physically, mentally. When you’re still healing.’

Well, was Ollie in, or was Ollie out? The implication was that I was doing it, either way.

He finished his vodka.

I was insistent and Ollie agreed, reluctantly, like he agreed to most things I said around that time in a desperate bid to make me smile again.

The next morning though, what had happened and what we had done when we were still grieving for our baby born only six months before had felt shocking. And for us, it marked the beginning of the end.

I shove in more Haribo. More. More.

After an hour and a half, the sat nav tells me I have one left turn to go. My stomach registers all of the sweets in that second and I fight the urge to vomit.

Ollie. I’m about to see Ollie.

You have arrived at your destination.

I take a deep breath and turn off the engine.

Out of the window, I see a man walking into the pub who looks like Ollie, except he doesn’t because he is in his early twenties and giddy and Ollie is in his thirties and by the look of his Facebook picture going grey and by the sounds of his messages, wary.

I unclip my seatbelt and get out of the car.

Deep breath.

Head in.

And it has to be one of the oddest things in life to walk into a pub and see your first love, all grown-up.

For me, Ollie is frozen in time, his arms in the air on a dance floor moving to Basement Jaxx with a lazy smile on his face. He has a bottle of Stella in his hand as he leans forward to touch the birthmark on my ear in a bar. He is naked, getting out of bed to walk to the kitchen to get us some water the morning after. He’s bringing in greasy packages of chip shop chips that we will devour to ease hangovers.

But now, he’s defrosted. It’s twelve years later and there is a tired-looking man drinking a coffee next to a pub window. He may well have had soya milk – he’s that kind, looks after himself even if he’s exhausted. The BMW in the car park might be his, but then perhaps it’s the Skoda with the Baby On Board badge in the back window.

He wanted children. I know that.

But with your first love you don’t know, you see, if he has a baby on board, because you do not know him, this man who took such a role in forming your whole life. Who is the reason you drink your coffee the way you do because you started drinking coffee when you were together. Who is the reason you get goose bumps from certain songs and cry at certain films.

You have thought of this moment, though, so many times, as you went to sleep, as you daydreamed on the bus, as you saw a date on the milk that made your stomach flip and realised it was his birthday. You have thought of telling him how well you’re doing, and looking good when you did it. You have thought how odd it is that you’re thinking all of this because why, when it’s so past and you don’t want him back.

You have thought Not now, when you have gone out with no make-up on and seen someone who looks like him from the back.

You have thought about not needing him any more, and how freeing that is.

And then you have wondered if that is real, if it would be, were you to see him again because what if first loves are like tornados; what if they obliterate everything in their path when they come along, even if on a calm day, when the sun shines, you can’t imagine their power? Perhaps you will always need him.

What am I doing?

You have thought of the romance of it all, of the depth of that immature love, and of all of that dancing. You have heard songs, and felt tears that contain seven different types of emotions.

You have thought of his skinny legs and his polo shirts and you have thought of his Midlands accent. He’s gone back home, Ollie, now he lives in Birmingham. To get some help with childcare for his children, perhaps? For extended family to be close to his own new one?

You have thought of that first love telling you that he wanted to be with you forever, and how that can have derailed. You have thought that well, it’s good that it did because look at you now with your real life, but also that it’s bad because look at you then, so in love and how can that not be sad, that it didn’t last.

You have thought how old the daughter you had together would be now, and now, and now, and now, and nothing has ever hurt like that does, every time.

You have thought everything, because twelve years is enough time to do that, and then suddenly there is no more thinking because he is there.

Before he spots you he is on his phone, because of course, what else.

We didn’t do that the last time I saw him. Phones were functional, still, for contact not time-wasting.

And so you stop for a second to try to make your heart stop racing and breathe so that your voice sounds normal, and so that you don’t seem rehearsed, like you haven’t played this out a hundred times, which of course you have because yes, twelve years. Twelve years of thoughts.

While you do that, you stare at him, at his head bowed, because he hasn’t yet realised you are there.

Could you have done that to me, I wonder? Are you capable? The man I know is not capable but look at him: his face has shifted. It’s not a leap to think his character may have shifted with it.

The anticlimax, though, when a moment that was so nostalgic, so loaded in all of those scenes you played out, is dominated by the mundane.

‘Hey,’ is the first word I say to this man, this man who adored me, my first baby’s father. ‘Do you want another coffee?’

He looks up and says nothing, but his face contracts.

‘I’m going to order one,’ I say eventually, swallowing hard.

I walk away but when I get to the bar I am shaking and so I order a glass of wine. Red, large.

It is very, very like having an affair, except that the sex part is out of the way and I regret it already. The one time, with Mitch I mean.

Then I sit back down next to him and we are silent, taking each other in and recalibrating. I want to fling my arms around him tightly and tell him how much it all meant, but it’s odd and not allowed and we’re grown-ups now and there are boundaries.

So we observe them. We talk about our journeys today, distances, parking. We move on to houses, locations, jobs.

‘You’re quite big news in the mum blogger world, I see.’ He smiles, almost proud and I think that’s okay. He can be proud – he helped to form me.

I laugh.

‘Apparently so,’ I say. ‘Who’d have seen that coming?’

I am gentler with you, I think. Soft.

I am enjoying his company like I always did and I have to remind myself to be suspicious of him, wary.

‘Just going to the loo,’ I say and when I’m there I check my lipstick and add a little concealer.

‘So you’re married?’ I say, back at the table, and Ollie nods.

‘Rose,’ he says. ‘We’ve got two girls, Holly and Jade.’

I am oddly unmoved. This new life of his feels unreal; something unmoored from me, floating around far away. I can’t quite believe it.

‘And you have Ed and Poppy, I see.’ He smiles. ‘Easy to find out all about your life from Instagram. Not that I was stalking but once you got in touch, I did have a look.’

I nod. Of course I know it’s out there but it suddenly hits me how exposed I am.

We sit for a second. Now For The Main Event, says the pause.

Ollie breaks the silence with something he has obviously practised. It masquerades as a joke, but his eyes say terror.

‘So you didn’t have a kid that’s mine then?’

There’s a beat as he realises what he’s said.

‘I mean …’

I shake my head to tell him it’s okay but my smile falters.

‘No,’ I say eventually as I compose myself. ‘I would probably have mentioned that earlier.’

He’s a good actor, if he did send the video.

‘Do you really not know?’ I say suddenly, downing the last of my wine and fighting the urge to order another one, despite the fact I have to drive home, ‘why I contacted you?’

He shakes his head. Smiles at me. He keeps doing that, a really big, genuine smile like it is nice to see me, and it is contagious and I do it back before I remember, each time, why I am here.

‘The kid was my best guess,’ he says.

‘Serious?’ I ask.

‘God knows,’ he mutters. ‘I could see they weren’t on your Facebook but maybe that was deliberate. I don’t know. It was pretty out of the blue.’

He reaches for my hand.

‘And we had managed it once before.’

His eyes fill with tears as mine do and we think of our baby girl, just for that second, together. I wonder if that means as much to him as it does to me. It’s such a relief.

We sit then again in the company of that shared experience and shared loss. There is calm from being able to think about my first baby with the only other person who understands and I tighten my other hand around his. He squeezes back, and it feels like clinging.

‘I know,’ he says. ‘I think about her.’

It takes a few minutes to regroup.

I let go of his hand and go to the bathroom again. When I come back he stares at me.

‘So. Come on then. Tell me what it is, new strait-laced Scarlett. Scarlett, Scarlett, Scarlett.’

There it is. That singsong. We smile.

And I realise I would look strait-laced to him in fresh make-up, drinking a glass of red without the wide eyes and the bare legs.

My heart pounds. He DJ’ed sometimes, too. Staring out at me from the decks as I danced for him. What an odd thing, to go off and live life and procreate and move on, but to leave a bit of you back there, twenty-two and besotted.

He repeats my name. ‘Scarlett, Scarlett, Scarlett.’

I’m still back there, which means I can’t speak here, now.

‘What is life like now then?’ he asks. He leans forward, onto the table, looking in my eyes. ‘Is it all book clubs and organic kale? Are you …’

He does a hammy gasp.

‘Are you … respectable?’

I blush, like I’ve been caught out. Like the police have come to the door to arrest me for something I did twenty years ago. I’m a fraud, I think. Whatever facade I’ve put on, it’s not convincing.

But his teasing is warm. And it’s nice to break the sadness of earlier.

‘I am actually, yes,’ I say after a while. ‘And I like it. Like you say, respectable. People respect me.’

My eyes fill with tears.

‘Or they did.’

He raises an eyebrow.

‘Tell me if you did it, Ollie. Tell me if you shared the video.’

But when I look up, sobbing, I know he didn’t.

Because while his hair has greyed, his eyes haven’t changed.

‘Fuck, Scarlett, what happened to you?’ he says. He goes to touch my face and I see him stop himself, think, about his wife probably, and how this would look, might have looked, as he sits in a pub with his ex. But then he does it anyway.

I tell him what happened.

He slumps back in his chair and I realise for the first time that this affects him too. Sure, I’m female, and so I bear the biggest load of it, but it’s his body, his sexuality that’s up there too.

‘Rose,’ he says, looking queasy. ‘My parents. The kids, even, when they’re older. The thought of people seeing that …’

He looks at me.

‘Why would I do that?’ he says. ‘To myself as well as you.’

I flounder now, defensive almost.

‘Oh come on, Ollie, everyone knows it’s not as embarrassing for a bloke. There’s no shame for you. Maybe you wanted to get revenge. For me leaving you.’

He looks at me.

‘After all of this time?’ he says. ‘You think I’m that bitter?’

Then, quietly and sad. ‘You didn’t really think it was me?’

He says it hoping.

I say nothing.

‘You did,’ he says, devastated, and I duck my head.

If Ollie didn’t do this, then it isn’t over. And it means I have to contact Mitch.

‘Do you have a number?’ I ask, wincing.

Ollie looks up from the dregs of his coffee.

‘For Mitch. Do you have a number?’

He shakes his head.

‘Sorry, Scarlett,’ he says. He thinks. Scrolls through his phone contacts. ‘I don’t keep in touch with anyone who knows him either.’

I can’t make eye contact with him because now, more than at any other point in the conversation, we have to picture it. The night that I tried to break our grief, not understanding myself well enough to know that I was really trying to break our relationship, by bringing someone else into our private sphere. Self-destruct didn’t cover it; it was relationship destruct, life destruct.

I was sad and I had been through something no one should have to go through, not least when they are twenty-three and living in a shared flat and working in a pub and also have done their share of pain already, surely, losing their mum from breast cancer when they were barely able to remember her.

I’d pressed a button I needed to press to get out, away from Ollie and clubs and grief and drugs and vodka and music and sadness. It was a grim method of making those things happen because I didn’t know how otherwise. That was my whole world.

Mitch, that friend of a friend, was up for it. God knows how drunk you have to be to have that conversation, but however drunk that is, I was it.

And Mitch was gorgeous. Grass-green eyes, auburn hair, a cheeky smile. A party boy, another sometime DJ – weren’t they all – an overgrown child, like all of our friends.

My C-section scar was still pink when I took my clothes off. Mitch didn’t notice. It stung when he touched me. He still didn’t notice.

Ollie flushes red and I know he is remembering too.

How it broke us, sharing us and our bodies and our world, especially at that point when all of it was so fragile.

How that had been the point.

Because perhaps if it hadn’t been for that night and the awkwardness afterwards, we might have made it. But I didn’t want to make it. I wanted to run away from every memory of our girl and her existence. Including the man who made her.

I picture it.

Mitch’s closely cropped hair. His legs, skinny like Ollie’s. But he was different to Ollie with his gym-honed upper body, young enough that it could still work out in the mornings after brutal drug and alcohol binges.

I remember when we went home together – the same night we discussed it – to mine and Ollie’s flat. I remember chunks, but nothing clearly. Mitch watching as Ollie and I had sex. Sobering up just enough to see Ollie’s face as Mitch touched me. Feeling oddly removed, like I had from all of life for that previous six months too, as I had sex with Mitch. Seeing a look of alarm cross Ollie’s face like he couldn’t believe we were doing this. Could we love each other at that moment?

I force myself to come back to the present.

I ask Ollie, despite my shame.

‘Can you remember much about that night?’ I mutter quietly.

‘Yes,’ he says with emotion. ‘I remember Mitch filming.’

I think of the quantities of vodka I had drunk. The quantities of vodka I drank a lot of nights. Of how much we used to drink and of how little we used to consider consequences or the future, or the impact of anything on anything.

I nod. I had vague memories of Mitch filming too.

I hadn’t cared. This was twelve years ago. The world had barely coined the phrase ‘revenge porn’. It was a bit of fun. We thought the worst a camera phone had to offer was some dodgy pixilation.

The truth is that when someone was filming the video that would ruin my life, I might as well have turned to the camera phone, grinned and winked.

‘Did he send you a copy?’ I ask Ollie, cringing.

He looks appalled. ‘No! God. Of course not.’

I tried to remember more. Did Mitch send it to me? Did I have a copy in the days before I took computer security seriously? Ever show it to anybody? I don’t think so but I couldn’t swear to it. I was drunk, it’s been years, life was blurry then. Life has become blurry again now.

We sit in silence for a few minutes.

‘You know you said you were having trouble tracking Mitch down?’ says Ollie eventually. ‘I know Mitch was short for his surname. Mitcham. If that’s of use.’

And it is. There was no formality with Mitch. He wasn’t someone you put in your address book and wrote Christmas cards to. You couldn’t imagine him having an oven. Everyone just knew him as the DJ, thingy’s mate, y’know, Mitch. This is more than that. This helps.

I walk out of the pub loaded with a wedge of guilt, for accusing Ollie, and for inflicting this on him now too.

We hug for slightly too long and I feel tipsy from what I know, really, was too much wine for a stomach only lined with sweets and too much emotion for a woman and her ex and all the nerves of meeting him in the first place and an increasing feeling of unsettledness for where the hell this mess will end.

And in the car I email Mr White.

Met Ollie, I tell him. He denied it and I believe him. Just working on a contact for the other man. Think it’s much more likely to be him.

And then I shove my hand back in the Haribo, turn the music back up and start my long drive home, hands trembling on the steering wheel.

6
Scarlett

7 May

DJ Manchester Mitcham.

And it’s easy, then. Those two extra letters do it.

I find him on Twitter, still pedalling his DJ skills at the odd fortieth birthday party. I send him a short DM, asking to meet up.

All right love, he replies. That’s a blast from the past. But yeah, sure. Everything okay? D’you know the Anchor pub in town? Could meet you there after work tonight?

I’m meeting up with the other guy, I message Ed, who’s at work. I feel victorious. This has to be it, despite the friendliness of Mitch’s messages. If it’s not Ollie, who else? And I never knew Mitch well. Who knows what sort of person he is, what motivation could have led him to this? The story will unravel soon, I’m sure of it. So hopefully some answers soon.

Keep me posted, he replies. And send me the details of where you’re meeting. I can come, if you want?

Jesus, I think. Imagine.

Best if I go alone but I’ll keep in touch, I say. I tell him the name of the pub.

I pick up the phone to Mr White, who I speak to often enough now that he has become Jonathan.

‘Made contact with Mitch,’ I say.

‘Great news,’ he says, jovial. ‘Keep all the notes. I’ll ask Lynne to book you in for later this week. We can go through everything then. Let’s get him, Scarlett.’

I get to the pub early.

Poppy is still going to the childminder until I figure out what the hell is going on with work; until I’m out of this limbo. Then Ed took her straight from Ronnie’s to Liam’s house so she can play with her cousins.

I check the clock above the bar. Most likely Ed is watching Poppy create a crime scene from a bowl of pasta about now. I smile thinking of her with tomato sauce smeared around her soft mouth, then take out my phone to scroll through pictures and distract myself. This time, I stay away from wine and order strong coffee.

I rip the top off a sachet of sugar and see that my fingers are shaking. I’m not sure they have stopped since I met Ollie. This has to be it, surely.

I try to decant half of the sugar sachet and then think of all the ways my life is now out of control and so I pour the lot in, adding a second.

Things used to be measured, I think, so recently.

Oily fish on allocated days and takeaways reserved for weekends. Now they are so out of control, so unordered, it is impossible to imagine getting back on course.

When Mitch walks in, I see him instantly. He is still large, though now it’s a largeness that speaks of pints and chips for dinner, and having not seen a vegetable for a long time. Before it was a largeness that spoke of whole afternoons in the gym and protein for breakfast at a time when the rest of us thought health food was a sugary cereal bar.

‘Mitch.’

He looks weathered, Mitch. Old. Like the DJ’s packed up and the bar has closed but he’s still at the party, telling twenty-two-year-olds that they are lame for going home; that it wasn’t like this in his day. To stay! Stay! Have one more! Let’s do pills!

‘All right,’ he says awkwardly and I’m surprised by how clearly I remember his Manchester accent, strong even for someone who had lived in the city their whole life like me. ‘Drink?’

I shake my head and Mitch heads straight to the bar, while I sit and wait.

He comes back and plonks himself in the chair with a bottle of beer like a thirteen-year-old who’s just been picked up from a party earlier than they wanted to be. I stare at him. Confronted by the man who I am sure ruined my life, I am struggling to keep calm.

He looks up at me, raises an eyebrow.

‘So then?’ He smiles. ‘What’s this about?’

I would never have struggled with this confrontation before; would have been powered through it with rage. Now though, I am dealing with the maternity leave confidence crisis. Too much time in my comfort zone; too much time in pyjamas.

I hide my hands under the table, so that Mitch does not see them vibrate.

‘I’m not sure how well you remember me,’ I begin.

‘Yeah sure.’ He grins, amiable. ‘We hung out a lot, back in the day.’

We did, from a distance. In a wider circle, often at the same parties or the same nights out. It was only that one night though that we moved in closer.

My nails are out from under the table and in my mouth. I long for something stronger in my coffee. I am remembering, and I am angry with younger me for having sex with this man for performance not pleasure. For doing it when what she actually craved was a hot water bottle.

I hate that I was playing a part. Party girl, boundary pusher, fun girlfriend and, mostly, non-mum. It hurts that I did that to myself.

‘Yeah, so,’ I say, trying to get it together. Wishing for a friend to squeeze my hand. Wishing for kind eyes to meet mine and tell me I am safe. Wishing for Ed, on some level. ‘A video has been posted of me, you and Ollie and sent to my friends.’

Please don’t make me explain, I think but when I look up, I know I don’t need to.

‘Of me, you and Ollie …?’

‘Yeah. My boyfriend. I mean my boyfriend then. Yeah.’

I only get one second to do this so I need to do it right. I stare at him, analysing his face and trying to work out if it was him. I look at his clothes, try to decipher if he’s short of cash; if that could be the reason he’s done this.

I have been thinking about this more and more – if at some point something worse will be threatened and I will be blackmailed, and that’s where this is going.

My stomach dives. I know what it is I’m thinking about; the thing I fear being revealed. The story Ed can never, ever know.

Mitch may know it. It’s possible.

I look again. His clothes are nice, new. I look at his face. Try to work out in that second if he’s an attention-seeker, or stalker. If he’s cruel, or odd, or both.

But all he seems is normal.

‘Jesus,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry. Did Ollie post it?’

‘No,’ I say, oddly defensive of Ollie now. Ollie at least cared about me. ‘Ollie wouldn’t do that.’

But I had thought it. I had thought Ollie could. And now he wasn’t in front of me, I wondered it again. It doesn’t take long for human beings to become theoretical when you can’t see their eyes.

‘Sure?’ he asks.

‘Sure,’ I say, unsure.

‘So who?’

There’s a beat when he gets it but I spell it out anyway.

‘You, maybe,’ I say, with a tremble in my voice. ‘I thought maybe you.’

His eyebrows shoot up. ‘You serious, Scarlett?’ he says.

I nod.

‘No,’ he says. ‘I didn’t do that. I wouldn’t do that.’

He sighs.

‘Look, I don’t mean this to sound rude, honestly I don’t but …’ he says. ‘Well, I must have slept with fifty people since you. What happened between us, it wasn’t that big a deal to me to be thinking about it or … posting it, all these years later.’

I flush red. I’m in ballet pumps and cropped jeans. My dark brown hair, hacked bluntly at the nape of my neck, has lost its gloss and is in a tiny ponytail. My bag is tan and large and designer and contains nappies. I clutch it close to me like a child and colour again.

Most of these women he sleeps with are younger than me, probably. Hotter. I no longer sparkle. So why would he target me? Because I’m rich now? Because Cheshire Mama has made me visible? Because visible and exposed and rich is a tempting combination?

‘But it has to be you,’ I say. ‘You were filming.

He sighs, infuriated.

‘Was I? Well, I still didn’t do it,’ says Mitch, and swigs the last of his beer.

‘Ok then, did you share it with anybody else? Send it round to your mates?’

He shakes his head.

‘Not my style. You might want to go back to Ollie about this. Maybe he was filming too. Or got hold of my phone or something. I saw him around a bit for a while. He was broken when you left him. You sure he wasn’t angry enough to take some revenge? It happens, you know. Being dumped can do bad things to a person. Maybe his life didn’t go that well. Maybe he blames you. Maybe he never got over you.’

I can’t confront him further, can’t press him, because suddenly all I can think is how I need to be home with my child.

Everything has an added layer of shame when I think of my daughter, who has a mother who did this. I’m not clean enough for her. I’m not good enough.

I run out of the pub and jump into my car as Mitch – who sounds genuinely concerned as he shouts after me to ask if I am okay, if I am safe to drive – tries to catch up with me.

In the car park, I put my head on the steering wheel and turn up the Noughties house music that’s been the soundtrack to my life, in secret the last few years, replaced in public with more middle-of-the-road music, news headlines or even – Ed’s preference – a little afternoon play on Radio 4, like we are sixty-five and slowing into our retirement.

But now, what’s the point in turning it down? Turn the real me up; blast her out.

If Ollie didn’t do it, and Mitch didn’t do it, I think, then who the hell did?

Suddenly there is a knock next to me on the window and I leap. Mitch indicates to me to wind my window down. He leans on it. I turn the music down.

‘Just one thing,’ he says, palms up in a gesture that tells me he means no harm. ‘When you got in touch, I googled you. You’re very out there online now with that blog and the kind of numbers you have and it doesn’t take much of a glance at the pictures of your house and clothes and whatever to see that you’re pretty loaded. Maybe someone worth blackmailing? That could be where this is headed.’

He shrugs. ‘Just a thought anyway,’ he says, and then he walks away, out of my life again.

And I think again of the secret I’m still keeping close and feel my whole body start to tremble, an earthquake at my core.

It’s another twenty minutes until I am capable of driving home and I spend the journey wondering if it all has to go now: Cheshire Mama, my side-hustle and the thing I have been clinging to since I walked out of work three days ago. I need to deal with that too. Answer Flick’s calls. Make some decisions. I’m drowning.

The noise hidden beneath the beat of the music, I cry so hard as I drive that it feels like my face is bruised and like my life is bruised, way beneath its skin.

Anon

She drives past me, that evening, no Poppy in the car.

Where are you going, Scarlett? She hasn’t mentioned anything in her messages and it’s a pretty big deal if one of us makes it out in the evening at the moment, with our young babies making 8 p.m. feel like midnight.

Out of her window blasts a song that is too familiar to me. My stomach lurches.

I only get a quick glance through the open window but Scarlett has bare shoulders; lipstick on. She doesn’t make that effort for many people. As I said, Scarlett prefers to be (very deliberately) ‘effortlessly’ casual.

I watch as her car moves further away, heading towards the station. Into town, most likely.

After-work drinks with old friends?

Or the other thing?

I stare after her, until her car disappears from sight.

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