The Stepmothers’ Support Group. Sam Baker

I’ve-only-been-gone-two-minutes-is-everything-OK? Glance.

      ‘Look,’ Sophie said, waving the book. ‘Look what Eve got me!’

      ‘Aren’t you lucky?’ Ian looked pleased.

      ‘What’s Eve got me?’ Alfie asked again.

      ‘For God’s sake Alfie,’ Hannah said. ‘Don’t be so rude.’ She was grown up enough to sound like her mother. Well, what Eve remembered Caro sounding like from hearing her on television.

      ‘That’s enough,’ Ian said, rolling his eyes. ‘Chill, both of you. And Hannah, you know I don’t like you saying for God’s sake.’

      Hannah scowled.

      Nervously, Eve offered Alfie a copy of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. With Roald Dahl’s words and Quentin Blake’s illustrations, it was a book she loved. She still had a copy somewhere, probably in her parents’ attic.

      ‘Hey Dad, look,’ Alfie said, snatching it. Immediately whatever chocolate wasn’t smeared on his face was transferred to the book’s cover. ‘Spiderman’s got a new hovercraft.’ He sat one of his plastic figures on the book, before turning to Eve.

      ‘You be Venom.’

      ‘Later,’ Ian said. ‘Let Eve eat her cake first.’ He smiled at her, then glanced at the table, a frown creasing his face. ‘Alfie,’ he said. ‘Where is Eve’s éclair?’

       TWO

      ‘They’re…Well, cute, I guess.’

      ‘Cute?’ Clare Adams said.

      ‘Yes, cute. Small, blonde, cute.’

      The woman leaning on the work surface turned to look at her. ‘They’re children and there are three of them. There has to be more to say about them than, they’re cute.’

      Eve was in the kitchen of her friend’s flat in East Finchley. It was a small flat, with an even smaller kitchen. As it was, there was barely room for the two of them. When Clare’s daughter, Louisa, got home it would be full to capacity.

      Rubbing her hands over her face, Eve felt the skin drag. The magazine’s beauty director was always telling her not to do that. But Eve did it anyway, pushing her face into her hands hard enough to see stars. How could one hour with three children be so draining?

      ‘OK, let’s be honest about this. Cute, well brought-up…And lethal. Like a miniature firing squad. Only some of them wanted to shoot me more than others.’

      ‘Now we’re getting somewhere,’ said Clare, flicking off the kettle just as it was coming to the boil. ‘You know, I don’t think a cup of tea is going to cut it.’

      Heading for the fridge, she peered inside at the chaos of Louisa’s half-eaten sandwiches and jars that had long since lost contact with their lids. Emerging with half-empty bottles in either hand, Clare said, ‘Already opened bottle of Tesco’s cheapest plonk or own brand vodka and flat tonic?’

      ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t think to bring wine,’ Eve said. ‘I just…fled, I s’pose.’

      After leaving Patisserie Valerie, Eve had made the journey on the Northern Line from Soho to East Finchley on autopilot, not even calling ahead to make sure Clare was at home. Although Clare was almost always home at weekends. A single mum, with a teenage daughter on a secondary school teacher’s salary, she rarely had the spare cash for a bit of light Saturday afternoon shopping.

      And when she did, it was Louisa who got the goodies.

      ‘You want me to pop to Tesco Express on the High Road?’ Eve asked, reaching for her bag.

      ‘No need.’ Using her arm, Clare swept aside exercise books to make space on the table for a bottle of Sicilian white and two large wineglasses. ‘All I’m saying is, it’s not Chablis!’

      When Ian first announced he’d like her to meet his children, Eve had thought they’d make a day of it: shops, a pizza, perhaps the zoo. An idea Ian rapidly squashed.

      At the time she’d been hurt, maybe even a bit offended.

      But now…

      Now she was grateful he’d insisted they keep their first meeting brief. ‘So as not to wear them out,’ he’d explained. Eve couldn’t help thinking that she was the one in need of recuperation.

      After Patisserie Valerie came Hamley’s for Alfie and Sophie, and Topshop for Hannah. Ian had grimaced when he told Eve. And Eve had wanted to hug him. Ian hated shopping. For him, Topshop on a Saturday afternoon was like visiting the nine gates of hell, all at once.

      ‘You are good,’ she whispered, when the children were packing their possessions into rucksacks, carrier bags and pockets. Or, in Alfie’s case, all three at once.

      ‘It’s in the job description.’ Ian kept his voice light, but his meaning was clear. He was their dad, and not just any old dad, not an every-other-weekend one, or a Saturday one. He was full-time, 24/7, widowed.

      He was the there-is-no-one-to-do-it-if-I-don’t model.

      As Eve recounted her meeting with Ian’s kids, badly chosen books and all, Clare sipped at her wine. It was more acidic than when she’d opened it the night before, allowing herself just the one, after Louisa went to bed. Well, Lou claimed she’d gone to bed. Clare knew better. Her daughter had probably spent a good hour on YouTube; only turning off her light when she heard footsteps on the stairs.

      Clare had learnt the hard way to choose her battles, because, as a single mum, there was no one to back her up. If Louisa and she argued, it seemed much more serious. Besides, if they weren’t there for each other, who was?

      Clare had saved hard to buy a laptop for Lou’s thirteenth birthday; taken in extra exam marking to pay the monthly broadband bill. It will help with your homework, she told Louisa at the time. If Clare was honest, it was about more than that. She wanted Lou to fit in and have the stuff that her friends had, not always to be the one who went without. Not that the reconditioned Toshiba from a computer repair shop on Finchley Road was the latest thing, but it could pass for new, and it worked, and Louisa had been ecstatic. The expression on Lou’s elfin face when she first turned it on made all the long nights at the kitchen table marking exam papers worthwhile.

      Occasionally, Clare felt her life was one long night at a kitchen table. After Louisa was first born, it had been a pine table in Clare’s mother’s kitchen in Hendon; revising for the A-levels she’d missed, what with being eight months pregnant. At Manchester University, it had been an Ikea flat-pack in a grotty student house she’d shared with three others. One of whom was Eve. It was Eve who lasted. The others came and went, endlessly replaced by yet more students who freaked out at the idea of having a toddler around to cramp their style.

      Now it was a pine table again. And, even now, Clare couldn’t work until Lou was asleep, the flat was still, her light came from an Anglepoise lamp that lived in the corner during the day, and the low mutter of the BBC’s World Service kept her company.

      Not normal, she knew.

      Clare had been sixteen when she met Will. She’d been smitten the first time he walked into her AS level English lit class, his dark floppy hair falling over his eyes. By the end of the second week they’d been an item, a fixture.

      He was her first boyfriend, her first true love and, so far as she knew, she was his. At least, he’d told her she was. They’d done everything together. First kiss, first love, first fumble, first sex. Life had been a voyage of mutual discovery. And then, halfway through the next year, she’d become pregnant and everything—everything—had come crashing down.

      Her mum and dad only got married because her mum was pregnant, with Clare. Her nan had married at seventeen; giving