“So,” she said. “How long have you and I been, ummm, seeing each other for?”

Dominick glanced quickly at her and away again. He tied the end of the balloon and watched it float straight up to the ceiling with the others.

Without looking at her, he said, “About a month.”

Alice had told Dominick that the doctors had said her memory loss was only temporary. He looked terrified and seemed to be talking to her gently and carefully, as if she had a mild intellectual disability. Unless that was the way he always talked to her, of course.

“And it’s, ah, going well?” asked Alice recklessly. It was bizarre. Had she kissed him? Slept with him? He was very tall. Not unattractive. Just a stranger. She felt both repelled and mildly titillated by the idea. It reminded her of gurgly, giggly teenage conversations. Oh my God, imagine having sex with him.

“Yup,” said Dominick. He was doing something funny and nervous with his mouth. He was one of those awkward, geeky types.

He picked up another balloon and hooked it over the nozzle of the helium tank. He looked at her properly, full in the face, and said, almost sternly, “Well, I think so, anyway.” Actually, he was not unattractive.

“Oh.” Alice felt flustered and exposed. “Well, good. I guess.”

She longed for Nick to be sitting next to her. His hand warm on her leg. Claiming her. So she could enjoy talking, maybe even flirting, with this perfectly nice man in an appropriate, safe way.

“You seem different,” said Dominick.

“In what way?”

“I don’t know how to explain it.”

He didn’t say anything else. Apparently he wasn’t a talker, like Nick. She wondered what she saw in him. Did she even like him that much? He seemed sort of dull.

“What do you do for a living?” she asked. The standard dating question. Trying to unfairly slot him into a personality type.

“I’m an accountant,” he said.

Fabulous. “Oh, right.”

He grinned and said, “Just testing to see if you really had lost your memory. I’m a grocer. A fruit and veg man.”

“Really?” She was imagining free mangoes and pineapples.

“Nah!”

Oh, God, this man was a nerd.

“I’m a school principal.”

“No, you’re not.”

“I’m being serious now. I’m principal at the school.”

“What school?”

“Where your kids go. That’s how we met.”

The school principal. Straight to the principal’s office!

“So you’ll be there tonight? At this party?”

“Yes. I’m sort of wearing two hats, because Jasper is in kindergarten, and this party is for parents of kindergarten kids. So I’ll be . . .”

He had a habit of not completely finishing his sentences. His voice just drifted away, as if he thought it was so obvious how the sentence finished there was no point saying it out loud.

“And why am I hosting it?” asked Alice. It seemed extraordinary. Why would she even think of doing such a thing?

Dominick raised his eyebrows. “Well, because you and your friend Kate Harper are Class Mums.”

“Like classy mothers?”

He smiled uncertainly. “The Class Mums arrange social events for all the other mothers, and communicate with the teachers, organize the reading roster, and, ah, that sort of . . .”

Oh Lord. It sounded horrendous. She’d become one of those volunteering, involved type of people. She was probably really proud and smug; she’d always known she had a tendency toward smugness. She could just imagine herself swanning about in her beautiful clothes.

“You do a lot for the school,” said Dominick. “We’re very lucky to have you. Speaking of which, it’s the big day coming up! Wow! I hope you’re going to be well enough for it!”

That man on the treadmill at the gym had mentioned a “big day,” too. “What do you mean?” asked Alice with a sense of foreboding.

“You’re getting us into the Guinness Book of Records.”

She smiled, ready to laugh at his next joke.

“No, really. You don’t remember at all? You’re baking the world’s biggest lemon meringue pie on Mother’s Day. It’s a big event. All the money raised is going to breast cancer research.”

Alice remembered her dream about the giant rolling pin. Ah. The rolling pin wasn’t a symbol at all. It was just a giant rolling pin. Her dreams were always so disappointingly obvious.

“I’m baking it?” she said in a panic. “This huge lemon meringue pie?”

“No, no. You’ve got one hundred mums baking it,” said Dominick. “It’s going to be amazing.” He knotted the end of another balloon together. Alice looked up and saw that the ceiling was now covered with blue and silver balloons.

Tonight she was hosting a party and next weekend she was planning to break a world record. Good Lord. What had she become?

She looked back down and saw that Dominick was staring at her.

“I’ve worked it out,” he said. “What’s different about you.”

He sat down beside her. Much too close. Alice tried to move unobtrusively away from him, but it was too hard on the squishy leather sofa without making a production of it. So she sat passively with her hands in her lap, schoolgirl style; surely he wasn’t going to do anything, with his son just a few feet away.