food cooking as you walk along the street and see a fox just stroll by like it’s on its way home from the pub at closing time. I long for its refusal to go slow.

When I leave my unhappy home, I want to fall into the sea of a city. Swim deep into it. Float around, alone, while I get my head clear. But here, there is nowhere to go.

Poppy sleeps and I stop in the middle of a field and sit next to her pram. Poppy is protected with a rain cover but my trousers soak through as I sit, numb in the rain. Eventually, I go home and as Poppy continues to sleep in her pram, stand under a steaming shower for a long, long time.

In there, I think.

Us. Cheshire.

The water is so hot it stings as I think about them, my mum friends.

Cora, fixated on finding a plan to get a night away with Hunter around childcare.

Emma, juggling shifts, stressing about her late-night chip binge.

Asha, frowning about the wrong number of magpies, pining for her books, frantically trying to wipe her house clean of all traces of the child who is at that second careering through it with buttery fingers and a rogue felt tip pen.

How can I be looking for the person who has ruined my life within this crew of busy, preoccupied women with their young babies and their tunnel vision? Who would have the time, the energy?

And yet, something about it makes sense, in my gut.

I hear Poppy cry and I turn off the shower and step onto the bath mat that’s lost all bounce and should have been washed a month ago. I go down to Poppy wrapped in a too-small towel, hair dripping, and I am standing like that next to her pram in the hall when Ed puts his key in the door. He’s early.

‘Hey,’ he says, unstrapping her and picking her up as he looks away from my bare skin. ‘Dentist. Working from home this afternoon.’

We stand there in the most painful silence there is; the one in the space where there used to be in-jokes and kindness.

Ask him, I think.

Get your evidence first, I tell myself.

Ed keeps his eyes trained on our daughter even as he speaks to me.

‘You remember tonight’s the night I’m taking Poppy to Liam’s new house for a couple of days?’ he says. ‘I booked the time off work. Going to help Liam decorate and put furniture together while the kids play with Poppy.’

His brother. Right.

He goes to walk away then turns back, cheeks a little pink.

‘Are you drinking more lately?’ he says, clearly having rehearsed this. ‘We are getting through a lot and I’m not having much and I worry. When you’re with Poppy.’

I wonder how much he got through on his ‘boys’ weekend’.

Fucking hypocrite.

I walk away without answering and a little while later, they head off, leaving me with a house that is so empty, eerily still.

I sit in the silence and think about what happens if we split up. Of shared custody and solitary weekends and of how the hell I am ever going to fill them when I have a life that looks as empty as mine now does.

At 8 p.m., Cora messages.

Want to come round? she says. Michael’s at the pub.

No, I think. No. I don’t want to hang out with any of you until I know, for sure, which one of you has betrayed me.

And yet … I am desperate for company; desperate for noise.

And the terrible realisation, there is nowhere else I can go.

Perhaps spending time with Cora, one on one, will elicit some information too. Perhaps this will clear things up, one way or another. Get your evidence, Scarlett, get your evidence.

I walk round to Cora’s house and we drink wine quickly, before moving on to her spirits cupboard. If I’m holding back and on edge, she doesn’t notice. Too drunk. Too self-absorbed. I look up at the giant picture of her on her own living room wall. A faux fur wrap falls from her shoulder.

‘So, we think Ed’s not keeping it in his pants, right?’ is her opener, as she pours me a large red.

I bristle.

‘I don’t want to talk about it tonight,’ I say. ‘Can we just … talk about something else?’

She looks offended and we sit in silence for a few seconds.

‘God, Emma today,’ she starts, eventually. ‘Driving me crazy about bloody Slimming World points.’

‘But you like Emma, don’t you?’ I say. ‘She’s your mum bestie.’

If Emma did have some weird obsession with me, would Cora know?

‘Oh Emma,’ she says with a dismissive tone. ‘Well, we just bond over our shitbag husbands. And we’ve known each other a long time.’

But there’s affection in her voice.

‘Now,’ she says. ‘Talk to me about what’s happening with this video. We find out who posted it yet?’

I like the we. I am always so grateful for a we.

I try hard to remember that I suspect her, that I can’t relax here but there is alcohol and sugar and a giant faux fur cream throw over my legs and it is difficult. I want this to be real.

‘Well, Mitch was the one filming,’ I sigh. ‘But it makes no sense, why he would. I can’t stop thinking it’s somehow linked to Ed. To the way Ed is being with me.’

I glance at her for any reaction. The edge of a blush. Eye contact dipping away. But there is nothing.

And then Cora’s husband Michael comes through the door and I say my goodbyes.

I walk home, brain mushy with suspicion and unease layered over with amaretto and wine. I collected no clues. Learnt nothing. Surely it’s not her, I think. But then.

Turning into my path, I see darkness where there used to be candlelight and early nights and a man who loved me passing me a glass of red and smiling as he listened to tales of my night. Now, there is just an empty house, unlit and unwarmed. I shiver.

I

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