The kettle boiled.

If Ziggy really had hurt Amabella, and if he did something like that again, he would never get invited to any parties. The teachers would call Jane in for a meeting. She would have to take him to see a child psychologist.

She would have to say out loud all her secret terrors about Ziggy.

Her hand shook as she poured the hot water into the mug.

“If Ziggy isn’t invited, then Chloe isn’t going,” Madeline had said at coffee this morning.

“Please don’t do that,” Jane had said. “You’re going to make things worse.”

But Madeline just raised her eyebrows and shrugged. “I’ve already told Renata.”

Jane had been horrified. Great. Now Renata would have even more reason to dislike her. Jane would have an enemy. The last time she had had anything close to an enemy, she was in primary school herself. It had never crossed her mind that sending your child to school would be like going back to school yourself.

Perhaps she should have made him apologize that day, and apologized herself. “I’m so sorry,” she could have said to Renata. “I’m terribly sorry. He’s never done anything like this before. I will make sure it never happens again.”

But it was no use. Ziggy said he didn’t do it. She couldn’t have reacted any other way.

She took the cup of tea to the dining room table, sat back down at her computer and unwrapped a new piece of gum.

Right. Well, she would volunteer for anything on offer at the school. Apparently parental involvement was good for your child’s education (although she’d always suspected that was propaganda put out by the schools). She would try to make friends with other mothers, apart from Madeline and Celeste, and if she ran into Renata she would be polite and friendly.

“This will all blow over in a week,” her father had said at coffee this morning when they were discussing the party.

“Or it will all blow up,” said Madeline’s husband, Ed. “Now that my wife is involved.”

Jane’s mother had laughed as if she’d known Madeline and her propensities for years. (What had they been talking about for so long on the beach? Jane inwardly squirmed at the thought of her mother revealing every concern she had about Jane’s life: She can’t seem to get a boyfriend! She’s so skinny! She won’t get a good haircut!)

Madeline had fiddled with a heavy silver bracelet around her wrist. “Kaboom!” she’d said suddenly, and swirled her hands in opposite directions to indicate an explosion, her eyes wide. Jane had laughed, even while she thought, Great. I’ve made friends with a crazy lady.

The only reason Jane had had an enemy in primary school was because it was decreed to be so by a pretty, charismatic girl called Emily Berry, who always wore red ladybug hair clips in her hair. Was Madeline the forty-year-old version of Emily Berry? Champagne instead of lemonade. Bright red lipstick instead of strawberry-flavored lip gloss. The sort of girl who merrily stirred up trouble for you and you still loved her.

Jane shook her head to clear it. This was ridiculous. She was a grown-up. She was not going to end up in the principal’s office like she had when she was ten. (Emily had sat up on the chair next to her, kicking her legs, chewing gum and grinning over at Jane whenever the principal looked the other way, as if it were all a great lark.)

Right. Focus.

She picked up the next document from Pete the Plumber’s shoe box and held it carefully with her fingertips. It was greasy to touch. This was an invoice from a wholesale plumbing supplier. Well done, Pete. This actually relates to your business.

She rested her hands on the keyboard. Come on. Ready, set, go. In order for the data-inputting side of her job to be both profitable and bearable she had to work fast. The first time an accountant gave her a job, he’d told her it was about six to eight hours’ work. She’d done it in four, charged him for six. Since her first job she’d gotten even faster. It was like playing a computer game, seeing if she could get to a higher level each time.

It wasn’t her dream job, but she did quite enjoy the satisfaction of transforming a messy pile of paperwork into neat rows of figures. She loved calling up her clients, who were now mostly small-business people like Pete, and telling them she’d found a new deduction. Best of all, she was proud of the fact that she’d supported herself and Ziggy for the last five years without having to ask her parents for money, even if it had meant that she sometimes worked well into the night while he slept.

This was not the career she’d dreamed of as an ambitious seventeen-year-old, but now it was hard to remember ever feeling innocent and audacious enough to dream of a certain type of life, as if you got to choose how things turned out.

A seagull squawked, and for a moment she was confused by the sound.

Well, she’d chosen this. She’d chosen to live by the beach, as if she had as much right as anyone else. She could reward herself for two hours’ work with a walk on the beach. A walk on the beach in the middle of the day. She could go back to Blue Blues, buy a coffee to go and then take an arty photo of it sitting on a fence with the sea in the background and post it on Facebook with a comment: Work break! How lucky am I? People would write, Jealous!

If she packaged the perfect Facebook life, maybe she would start to believe it herself.

Or she could even post, Mad as hell!! Ziggy the only one in the class not invited to a birthday party!! Grrrrr. And everyone would write comforting things, like, WTF? and Awwww. Poor little Ziggy!