“Who was it?” asked Lyn. She was squatting down, retying the laces on Maddie’s shoes. Maddie’s hands rested gently on her head.

“It was Hank.”

She looked at the bright red laces on Maddie’s shoes and felt as caught out as if she’d been unfaithful to him.

“Did he leave a message?”

“Yes. He said he got your e-mail about your panic attacks and to hang in there, because you’re not alone, and he’s got lots of really helpful information he’s putting together for you.”

Lyn finished tying up Maddie’s shoelaces and stood up, swinging her onto her hip. “O.K. Look. It’s nothing.”

“It’s something.” He was agitated, bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet, swinging the picnic basket. “You’re telling some bloody ex-boyfriend your problems. Some strange guy I’ve never met telling me about my wife’s problems!”

Lyn put a hand on his forearm and deliberately allowed a fragile note to creep into her voice. “I’ve got a cold. I’m really feeling terrible. Can we please talk about it after the party?”

He immediately, as she knew he would, lifted Maddie out of her arms and said without malice, “Of course.”

Oh, Georgina, no wonder you cried when I stole him.

With her head heavy against the passenger car seat and the Teletubby birthday cake safely on her lap, Lyn let her eyelids sink and wondered if she’d make it through the day.

Maddie kicked and chattered in her car seat between Kara and one of her more likable best friends, Gina. The girls were taking turns playing Around and Around the Garden, like a teddy bear tracing a circle on Maddie’s palm, causing her to chortle with rising anticipation until they tickled her tummy and she completely dissolved.

Every time she laughed, everyone in the car laughed.

As they pulled up at a set of lights on the Spit Road, there was a loud bip of a horn.

Michael looked out his window and said, “Look who made it after all.”

Lyn leaned forward and saw Cat in the passenger seat of Gemma’s car. They were both waving extravagantly. Cat wound down her window and held out a bunch of brightly colored balloons.

Watching their lips move excitedly and silently reminded Lyn of some moment in her life when she had understood something, for the first time. Something sad and inevitable. Her blocked sinuses and muffled head wouldn’t let her pin down the memory.

The lights changed and Gemma’s car sped off down toward the blue-green glitter of the harbor, the balloons still bobbing merrily out of Cat’s window.

Maddie went wild when they arrived at Clontarf and saw Gemma and Cat already unpacking picnic things and tying balloons to a tree.

“Mummy! Look! Cat! Gem!”

“This O.K.?” called out Cat.

Lyn waved an approving hand, and Maddie went running drunkenly across the grass to be scooped up by Cat and spun around.

Kara and Gina didn’t offer to carry anything from the car. They also went straight to Cat, both of them pulling out sheets of paper from their knapsacks. Lyn craned her neck to watch as the three of them bent their heads over the papers, the two girls laughing and pointing. She wished Kara could be as relaxed and natural with her.

“What do you think those three are talking about?” she asked Michael, as she slammed shut the boot.

“Homework?”

“In your dreams.”

The birthday picnic was well under way when Lyn got a call on her mobile from her play-group friend, Kate. They weren’t coming because her little boy, Jack, had just come down with chicken pox.

“Maddie probably has it too,” said Kate. “Nicole’s kid was the culprit; she would have been contagious at Julie’s lunch. Anyway, good to get it crossed off! Some parents have ‘pox parties’ to pass it around.”

“I had Maddie immunized.”

“Oh, I see. Well, I looked into it obviously but—”

A child roared in the background, so Lyn was spared the sweetly veiled criticism she knew she was about to receive. She felt far too woozy for it.

“You know, you missed out on chicken pox, Lyn.” Maxine looked up from her foldout chair, where she was delicately balancing a paper plate on her knees. “Gemma and Cat caught it when they went on that Christmas holiday with their father.”

“Oh, don’t remind their father,” said Frank. “What a nightmare.”

Now she remembered that memory. It was the day Cat and Gemma drove off in Frank’s car for the water-slide holiday. They were both up on their knees in the backseat, their faces pressed against the back window, shouting things to her that she couldn’t hear.

Different things will happen to us, six-year-old Lyn had realized and felt a little sad and shocked but also almost immediately accepting. It was logical. It made sense. There was nothing you could do about it.

“We probably infected about a thousand kids on that water slide,” said Cat.

“Oh shit,” said Lyn. She was thinking about Julie’s lunch and how Nicole’s runny-nosed little girl had wrapped her arms around Lyn’s knees.

Everyone looked at her.

“I think I’ve got chicken pox.”

Gemma patted her shoulder in a motherly fashion. “Nooo, you’ve just got a little cold!”

Lyn pushed back her cardigan sleeve to look at her wrist where she’d been scratching. There was a tiny little red sore. “I think this is the start of the spots.”