As they’d weighed flour, sugar, and too-cold butter straight from the fridge, Cora’s anxiety began to dissipate. She watched as Maia ushered mixture into cake tins, spilling batter down their sides, and realized this was all she needed to do. Just keep following one step with another.

She watches herself as she does this. She’s spent a lot of time like this recently—viewing herself from above as she moves around the house, changing nappies, ironing Gordon’s shirts, cooking for his parents. Almost as though it’s someone else doing these things. Only with Maia does she occasionally feel herself reinhabiting her body.

Sylvia Plath poem—“Morning Song”—and

“Seriously, we’re back here already? Cora, you’re my dearest friend, so I mean this kindly, but you are not responsible for the goings-on of the entire world. Yes, people’s lives bump and collide and we send one another spinning off in different directions. But that’s life. It’s not unique to you. We each make our own choices.”

There is a pain in her chest and images flicker through her mind: her mother shopping for it; wrapping the box in brown paper on the dining-room table, soft, liver-spotted hands smoothing the end creases into place; packing it into the car to post once the school day has finished. You did this. This is your fault, she tells herself.

“Oh, I’ve just had a small bone removed from my foot. It’s less dramatic than it looks.” “Which one?” “Sesamoid?” she replied, more of a question than a statement, because so few people seemed to have heard of it.

There’s something about that—when the quietest person, most reserved in their opinions, most reluctant to impose their thoughts on others, finally speaks; you hear.

Cora is used to sudden explosions that come at a light being left on, or realizing too late she’s been overly friendly in the way she’s spoken to a tradesman. She lives trying not to set a match to Gordon’s anger, but still she spills petrol about her,

she and Gordon were packaged together, two inseparable halves. It didn’t matter what their different roles might be, Cora was an equal impediment—something to be protected and worried over. Just as Gordon was a presence to be minded and feared.