Carla tipped her chair back, resting her bare feet on the chair in front of her, her eyes closed, only half listening to him. She’d heard this speech, or some variant thereof, before. She’d learned that there wasn’t a great deal of point putting forward her view, because in the end he’d do whatever he wanted to anyway. After a while, he stopped talking, and they sat together in companionable silence, listening to the neighborhood sounds, children shouting in the street, the ding-ding-ding of bicycle bells on the towpath, the occasional waterfowl quack. The buzz of a phone on the table. Carla’s. She picked it up, looked at it, and, sighing, put it down again.

Theo raised an eyebrow. “Unwelcome suitor?”

She shook her head. “Police.”

He looked at her for a long moment. “You’re not taking their calls?”

“I will. Later.” She bit her lip. “I will, I just . . . I don’t want to keep going over it, to keep seeing it. To keep imagining it.”

Theo placed his hand on top of hers. “It’s all right. You don’t have to talk to them if you don’t want to.”

Carla smiled. “I think I probably do.” She swung her feet off the chair, slipping them into the too-large slippers she’d borrowed from Theo. She leaned forward and poured herself a half cup of coffee, took a sip, and found that it was cold. She got to her feet, clearing away the breakfast things, placing the silver coffeepot and their mugs onto the tray, carrying them up the stone steps toward the kitchen. She reemerged a moment later, an old Daunt Books tote bag slung over her shoulder. “I’m going to go and get changed,” she said. “I need to get back across to Hayward’s Place.” She bent down, brushing her lips momentarily against his.

“Aren’t you done there yet?” he asked, his hand closing over her wrist, eyes searching her face.

“Almost,” she said, lowering her lids, turning away from him, disentangling herself. “I’m almost done.

“Are you going to do it, then?” she called back over her shoulder, as she headed up into the house. “Are you going to humanize Siobhan? You could always give her a dog, I suppose, if you don’t want to give her a lover. A little Staffie, maybe, some pitiful rescue mutt.” Theo laughed. “It’s true, though, isn’t it? You’re supposed to give your character something to care about.”

“She has plenty of things to care about. She has her work, her art . . .”

“Ah, but that’s not enough, is it? A woman without a man or a child or a puppy to love, she’s cold, isn’t she? Cold and tragic, in some way dysfunctional.”

“You’re not,” Theo said.

Carla was standing in the kitchen doorway; she turned to face him, a sad smile on her lips. “You don’t think so, Theo? You don’t think my life is tragic?”

He got to his feet, crossed the lawn, and climbed up to meet her, taking her hands in his. “I don’t think that’s all your life is.”

At the time, Carla wondered whether the book might spell the end of their marriage. Theo was away all the time, touring, going to festivals accompanied by pretty young publicists, mingling with ambitious twentysomethings promoting much-praised debuts, rubbing shoulders at parties with impossibly glamorous Hollywood development executives. Carla worked in the city at the time for a fund manager, in sales. At dinner parties, people’s eyes glazed over when she told them what she did; at cocktail parties, they glanced over her shoulder in search of more stimulating conversational partners.

She needn’t have worried about Theo’s head being turned. He tired quickly of touring life, of the punishing enthusiasm of bright young things. All he really wanted to do was to stay home, with her, and to write—he was planning a prequel to his successful novel, chronicling his protagonist’s mother’s experiences in the First World War. After Carla fell pregnant, he was even less-minded to travel, and once the baby was born, less so still.

Theo had missed two deadlines and was on course to miss a third when, just after his son’s third birthday, Carla announced that she had to go to Birmingham for a sales conference. She’d only recently gone back to work and it was vital, she said, that she make trips like this one if she wasn’t going to be sidelined, shunted onto the mommy track.

“Maybe I could come with you?” Theo suggested. “You, me, and Ben—we could make a weekend of it?”

Carla’s heart sank a little; she’d been fantasizing about the hours she might spend alone, soaking in the bath undisturbed, putting on a face mask, fixing herself a long drink from the minibar. “That would be lovely,” she said carefully, “only I’m not sure how that would be perceived. You know, me turning up with my husband and toddler in tow? Oh, don’t look like that, Theo! You’ve no idea what it’s like. If you showed up to a work do with Ben, they’d give you a medal for father of the year. If I do it, they’ll say she can’t cope, her mind’s not on the job, there’s no way she can handle any more than she already does.”

Instead of yielding, instead of just saying, Oh, all right then, darling, I’ll stay in London with Ben, you go ahead, Theo suggested they leave Ben with his parents.

“In Northumberland? How am I supposed to get him all the way to Alnmouth before Friday?”

“They could probably come and pick him up. They’d love it, Cee, you know how Mum adores him—”

“Oh, for God’s sake. If you really insist on coming, he’ll have to go to my sister’s. And don’t make that face, Angie adores him too, and she’s five minutes away and I don’t have time to organize something else.”

“But—”

“Let Angie have him this time; next time he can go to your mum’s.”

There never was a next time.

On the Sunday morning, they received a phone call in their hotel room. They were packing, getting ready to return to London, quarreling about the best route to take. The man on the phone asked them to come down to the reception desk, then he seemed to change his mind, spoke to someone else, and then said that in fact they should wait in their room, that someone would come to them.

“What on earth is this about?” Carla asked, but she received no reply.

“I bet some fucker’s broken into the car,” Theo said.

There were two police officers, a man and a woman. There had been an accident, they said, at Carla’s sister’s home. Ben had fallen from the balcony on the second floor of the house onto the garden steps below.

“But she keeps the study door shut,” Carla said dumbly. “The railings on the balcony are broken, so the door is always shut.”

The door hadn’t been shut, though, and little Ben had toddled out and slipped through the railings, falling onto the stone steps twenty feet below. His eight-year-old cousin, playing in the garden, found him; he’d called an ambulance right away.

“Is he going to be all right? Is he going to be all right?” Carla kept asking the same question over and over but Theo was already on his knees, howling like an animal. The police officer, the woman, had tears in her eyes and her hands were shaking. She shook her head and said that she was very sorry, that the paramedics had arrived within minutes but there was nothing they could do to save him. “But is he going to be okay?” Carla asked again.

Their father moved into a care home six months before he died, and since Carla was already living with Theo by this time, Angela took the old place over. She had grand plans for it, she foresaw years of painstaking renovation, she designed murals she planned to paint in the hallways and above the staircase. First off, however, were the essential repair jobs, the top priority being the roof. That, of course, took all the money there was to spare, so everything else had to be put on hold.

The rusted railings were barely thought of until Daniel was born. Once he was old enough to crawl, Angela locked the study door and left it that way. The rule was the study door stayed shut. At all times, the study door stayed shut.

“Where was Angela?” Carla and Theo were sitting in the back of a police car, neither in a fit state to drive. “Where was she?” Carla’s voice barely more than a whisper, her eyes squeezed tightly shut. “I just . . . I don’t understand. Where was Angela?”

“She was in her bedroom,” the policewoman told her. “She was upstairs.”

“But . . . why did Daniel have to call the ambulance? What was my sister doing?”

“It seems she was sleeping when the accident happened,” the policewoman said.

“She wasn’t sleeping,” Theo said, “she was sleeping it off. Wasn’t she?”

“We don’t know that,” Carla said, reaching for his hand.

He snapped his hand from hers as though scalded. “Don’t we?”

In a cold and brightly lit room, they stayed for more than an hour, passing their son between them. They kissed his tiny fingers, the soles of his feet. They warmed his cold flesh with their hands and their tears.

Afterward, the police drove them back to their home on Noel Road, where Theo’s parents were waiting for them. “Where is she?” were Theo’s first words to his mother. She jerked her head toward the stairs.

“Up there,” she said, her face and voice tight as a drum. “She’s in the spare room.”

“Theo,” Carla said, “please.”

She heard him shouting. “You were fucking sleeping it off, weren’t you? You were hungover, weren’t you? You left him, you left him alone, you left the door open, you left him. You left him. You left him.” Angela was wailing, keening in agony, but Theo would not relent. “Get out of my house! Don’t you ever come back here. I don’t ever want to see you again.”

Carla heard Daniel; he was crying too. “Leave her alone! Uncle Theo! Please! Leave her alone!”

When they were gone and the front door was closed, Theo’s mother turned to Carla and said, “Why didn’t you let him come to me? I would have looked after him.” Carla got to her feet, she balled her hands into fists, she walked through the kitchen into the back garden, where her son’s tricycle lay on its side in the middle of the lawn, and she started to scream.

Carla and Theo blamed themselves and each other endlessly; every sentence began with an if.

If you hadn’t gone to the conference

If you hadn’t insisted on coming

If you hadn’t been so worried about perceptions

If we had taken him to my parents

Their hearts were broken, shattered forever, and no amount of love, no matter how deep, how fierce, would be enough to mend them.