It wasn’t that she wanted to spend less time with her child. Anna adored the solid, knee-high mass of flesh and curls that bounced around their house like a pinball, pepped up on blueberries and story books and the never-ending buzz of discovering things for the first time.
Anna shivered where she stood, from the cold but also from the memory of prying a still-moving creepy-crawly from inside her son’s chubby fist before she had stepped out the door to go to work that morning. An hour later she had been seated in her law firm’s penthouse boardroom at a table so deliberately and aggressively wide it made even the trusted colleagues opposite feel like adversaries. The disconnect between Anna’s work and home lives made her smile on a daily basis, more often out of sheer bafflement than anything officially good-humored.
At least Sonny was out of nappies now; the months when she had cleaned up actual shit in the mornings before arriving in that glass-plated tower only to spend her day disposing of the metaphorical kind for spoiled, overgrown children who had made bad life decisions had been too painfully ironic to scrutinize closely.
And yes, she supposed she meant “ironic” the same way Alanis Morissette had.
She added the thought reflexively; it was the kind of music-journalist joke Steve would make. Steve with his jolly creative-industries job, his writing and the witty cultural observations he was paid significantly less than her to make.
Now, standing at the top of the steps across the road from her office, outside the courtroom she would be in for so long that she would likely miss Sonny’s bedtime once again, Anna shrugged her arms out of her blazer, suddenly too hot for it. The sleeves were getting tighter again, and not because she’d built up so much muscle carting all her paperwork around. The May sunshine was warm but the morning air hadn’t quite caught up, and it hung, like bathroom mist, around the spires and domes of London’s oldest district, where its laws had been made and barristers like Anna now maintained them.
She needed some time off. God, she needed it so much. Not just from work—she regularly reminded herself that she had the sort of job most people would kill for, not for the status or the money but for the simple and unusual fact that she enjoyed it most of the time—but from home as well. From Sonny, indirectly, but mostly from herself. The person she had become.
Only last night, unable to sleep again after one of Sonny’s predawn wake-ups, Anna had found herself trying to turn Steve’s phone off night mode in order to read his messages. She had crouched by his bedside table, inches from her husband’s slack features as he snored, and paged about unsuccessfully, attempting fruitlessly to hack the tech-nerd model he had insisted on paying slightly extra for. With whose money, Steve?
The two of them had a long-running joke about her not being able to work it, but the gag was becoming less funny the more texts her husband received from the same number just before lights-out each night.
It was difficult for their neighbor Celia, ferrying Olwen around her shifts at the salon without a partner to share the load, so Steve tried to help out where possible. Sonny and Olwen went to the same nursery, after all.
But those same shifts meant Celia—slim, attractive, naturally maternal Celia—was around far more during the day than Anna ever could be. Around during the day and just next door to where Steve wrote and interviewed and edited from the table in their kitchen.
Stop it.
Celia never seemed to be cross or frustrated with Olwen the way Anna so often was with Sonny.
Stop it.
Really, the perpetual state of low-level chaos in which Anna and Steve’s neighbor and her daughter lived was a cautionary tale; Anna should feel sorry for a woman whose husband had left her last year, not fear her as competition.
Anna needed this break. Just a week, surrounded by her friends, the people she had known since university, the gang who had grown into their thirties alongside her. A holiday that actually felt like one, instead of the usual kind she and Steve now had post-baby—ones that involved all the same chores, just set against a different backdrop, and made her and her husband feel like some bedraggled touring drama company permanently out on rep. Anna had had Lizzie and Dan’s wedding week on the horizon for so long, she had convinced herself that it was her opportunity to rediscover who she had been when they all met, to remind Steve of the real woman he had married. The one who laughed at his jokes and didn’t check her watch or her emails all the time.
Now the wedding had been called off, and that woman felt even more beyond her reach.
Anna’s phone vibrated with a message again: Steve.
“Damn. Poor Lizzie and Dan. Can we get our money back? We could just go somewhere by ourselves for a week?”
As much as Anna was desperate for some time with her husband—actual quality time rather than the silent and stodgy variety they spent watching TV dramas when they were too tired to speak—she knew she would only feel guilty if they did that. Choosing to leave Sonny behind was quite different from having been forced to by someone else’s wedding plans. When they’d seen the words “no children” on the invite, there had been a split second of indignation, but then—the spreading warmth of realization, followed swiftly by a giddiness Anna hadn’t felt in years.
The sort that descends at the beginning of a night out, at the first sip of whatever you’ve chosen to fuel it with, at the prospect of not knowing when or where it might end.
If she and Steve went away by themselves, she knew that the bad-mother pangs would no doubt kick in the very evening they arrived and she’d spend the
