It is one hour before Camilla’s life changes, though she doesn’t yet know it.
All she knows, right now, as she cleans the high chair while Polly sits on her play mat after breakfast, is that her husband isn’t here. He’s gone somewhere, left her to deal with Polly’s first day of nursery and Camilla’s return to work by herself. Has he got a deadline? Has she forgotten some urgent project?
But Cam doesn’t forget things. *Luke*, actually, forgets things. So . . . ?
Sunlight enters stage left in her kitchen in three distinct shafts. It’s a perfect June day, and Cam woke up a mixed bag of emotions: nervous but excited, sad, happy—her first day back at work after a long nine-month maternity leave. She sometimes longs for words in the English language that don’t exist, and today is one such occasion. Trepidation, excitement . . . when she woke up, she thought: Nope, none of them cut it.
And Luke has chosen today to disappear.
He must have some work thing on. He’s a ghostwriter, for MPs and celebrities, and has a co-working space he heads to when he needs to think. That’ll be it. She won’t think about it anymore. Won’t ruminate on it—definitely not, absolutely no ruminating, Cam thinks, gripping the dishcloth too tightly.
She watches as Polly leans forward to grasp a toy that’s sitting just out of reach. She’s so like Luke. Lean, blond, a disposition as sunny as the weather outside. Cam watches as she picks up the toy and throws it, a wobbly, random baby throw that could be deliberate, could be an accident. Funny, Cam’s always liked people-watching, but her baby is next-level.
Her phone beeps and she reaches for it immediately, hoping Luke has replied to her, but it’s her sister. *Morning*, it says, a selfie of Libby sitting on her sofa, dark hair mussed up in a pile on the top of her head. This kind of message is not unusual: Cam and Libby are engaged in a near-constant text conversation. It doesn’t have a beginning or an end, just a regular back-and-forth, a tennis match that never finishes. They’ve been doing it for as long as they’ve had phones.
*Morning*, Cam replies, taking a selfie of her in work clothes, anxious expression on her face that she didn’t know she had until she took it.
*OMG yes. The big day. Well—to bolster your confidence . . . look! Look who’s 12 down in the Times crossword?* It’s accompanied by a photograph of a clue, which reads *Author of bestselling recent novel about a hot air balloon ride romance (4,5).*
It’s her client, Maya Jones. Cam is her literary agent.
*Cam types back: Wow! I wonder if this is good press exposure? Do they print the answers next week?*
Libby sends a second photo of a very, very small set of answers for last week with a laughing emoji.
CAM: How many people read this?!
LIBBY: . . . Four? What’s your cut of four books? LOL.
CAM: £8 paperback × 0.1 royalty × 0.15 commission?
What’s that?
LIBBY: Drinks are on me, pal.
Cam forwards the crossword to Maya, then puts her phone away and yawns. Polly woke her and Luke last night at ten o’clock, one o’clock, and then some other time . . . three, four? Cam promised Luke she would stop looking at the time after he said it only upset her anyway. Polly—old enough now, in their opinion, to know much better—thought it was the middle of the day, and was absolutely, categorically, not interested in sleeping. Luke had looked at Cam, Ewan the bloody dream sheep backlit red behind him, Polly actually chuckling with mirth, and said, “Fancy a suicide pact?” And God, they had laughed, the way they always have. The second Cam met Luke, he made her laugh, and, just like that, she was utterly beguiled despite everything: that he, a writer, was her client, and she his agent. As it turned out, nobody cared about that the way she thought they might.
But where is he? How could he just leave her by herself?
Cam reluctantly gets Polly ready in the sling to walk to the nursery down the road, trying to accept that Luke, wherever he is, isn’t going to see Polly before they leave. The house sits quietly around them as she prepares to go, a loaded kind of silence that she tries to ignore: It’s the day. The return to work.
Cam has had barely any time to process this change, spent the settling-in sessions stress-walking the streets outside, maternal guilt morphing the inside of the nursery into some awful Dickensian orphanage staffed by ogres. She sometimes thinks she might’ve read too many novels.
But now it’s here, the day mother and daughter splinter into different existences. She said this to Luke only last night, who joked, “Oh, bloody hell, are you not picking her up after?” She’d laughed at that. In every couple, Cam thinks, there is a calm one and an anxious wreck, and Cam is most definitely the latter to Luke’s former.
Where is he?
She goes to grab her cardigan, and that’s when she spots it. On the table in the hallway is a piece of paper with her husband’s handwriting on it. As she looks at it, a half-memory of a coffee-scented goodbye kiss from him drifts across her mind, another of him in the shower, the sound of the water running in the distance, both in the veil just beyond deep sleep. So vague she isn’t sure that they happened today at all.
Luke once said he would always kiss her goodbye. “I’m never going to be one of those people who just forgets,” he once said. “Or, worse, a dry peck on the cheek!”
But did he?
She picks up the note.
If anything is written on one side. Huh? *If anything?* And crossed out? Cam holds the piece of paper up to the light. She turns it over. *It’s been so lovely with you both. Lx.*
Maybe the *If anything* is old. The main note is this one, surely? An end-of-maternity-leave note. *It’s been so lovely.* A kind of “good luck”?
There’s nothing else on it.
How weird. Luke—a writer, after all—is usually clear.
She finds their text thread. She’s asked once where he is, called twice, but she’ll text again.
As she stands there, overthinking, Polly strapped to her chest, she finds she doesn’t know where to start. Everything’s so loaded these days. Before the baby, time alone was just that. But now it’s a currency. One person’s me-time is the other’s solo parenting. They’re not used to it. They’ve argued about it . . .
*All ok? Sorry to ask again. PS. It’s about to happen! The big drop off!!! I am to be a working woman once again.*
She reads it over, used to proofreading for tone.
She touches the note, just once, sends the text, then leaves.
It is June 21, the longest day of the year, and the hottest so far, too, even at eight o’clock in the morning. The sun is as sharp and yellow as a lemon drop. Cam turns her face to it, apricating in it. Huge flowers have bloomed in the street, big and open happy faces nodding as Cam walks by. She points them out to show Polly (should Polly be understanding gestures yet?), thinking how much she takes the weather for granted lately. It’s been balmy for six straight weeks. No breeze, no rain. The same high, blue skies every day, pale at the edges, a deep cyan way up above, as if they’re living inside sea glass.
Cam and Luke’s lawn has turned yellow and beachy-looking. Each night, once Polly is in bed, Cam takes a novel out there, sits in a deck chair, and just plunges deep into its pages, like diving into a pool containing other worlds. Luke deals with Polly if she wakes. And he knows better than to try to strike up a conversation with Cam, too, during what she calls her introvert hour.