Sometimes, though, she did miss Alex. Well, not him exactly, more the warmth he left in bed in the morning. Sophie shook her head. Her mother was managing to railroad again. "Can we just for one moment try to think about the most immediate problem?" Sophie asked.

Iris looked rather vague.

"The kids!" Sophie had to remind her mum.

"I'm sorry I'm not more of an expert of motherhood," Iris said, the slight sharpness in her tone going over Sophie's head. "But, well, I think you just have to trust your instincts. Listen to your intuition and you won't go wrong."

"I think that's the problem," Sophie said glumly, wishing she hadn't smoked all five of her remaining cigarettes shortly after the girls had gone to bed.

"What is, dear?" her mum said.

Sophie looked up at her blankly.

"What's the problem?" Iris pressed her.

"Well, most women have intuition built in, don't they?" Sophie asked, remembering her point. "Give 'em a kid and they know what to do with it instantly-at least that's what we're all led to believe. But obviously I have that particular gene missing.... I never get any intuition about anything, Mum. I mean, how do I know what's for the best, unless I have all the available facts in front of me-unless it's there in black and white? This intuition business sounds like total nonsense to me-like reflexology or astrology."

Her mother smiled. "Your stars did say you were facing great upheaval."

"Really?" Sophie looked interested for a moment until she realized her mum was teasing her. "Anyway. I don't think intuition really exists. I think it's a myth."

"It isn't," her mother said.

"You would say that. And anyway, how do you know?" Sophie challenged her.

"I just know, the same way I know that you have it, Sophie," Iris said, pausing to find a way to talk to her prickly daughter without offending her. "Sometimes I think, with all this work and career and promotions, that you've forgotten yourself. You're always working toward something, but sometimes I wonder if you even know why."

Sophie rolled her eyes. "Mum, things are different now. I know what I want from my life. I want to get to the top. I don't need a man or children to be happy or successful or fulfilled. I want to be successful."

"But why?" her mother asked her.

Sophie looked at her mother and wondered how it was they shared the same language, because she never seemed to understand what Iris was going on about.

"I want to be the best I can," Sophie said, frustrated that the conversation had somehow drifted onto her mother's favorite subject-Things That Are Wrong with Sophie. "And anyway, this isn't about me," Sophie reminded her irritably. "It's about now and the next couple of weeks. I've got to come up with a coping strategy, and I thought you could help me. I should have known better."

Iris dipped her face and looked at her tea, and immediately Sophie felt sorry. "I'm not saying you're not a great mum. I mean, you are great and you are my mum and I love you. But you were never exactly conventional, were you?"

Her mother shrugged. "Possibly not," she said. "It was the seventies, dear. Nothing was."

"I know. All I'm saying is that I don't have it. I don't have that way you're supposed to have with kids. I understand Artemis better than I understand children, and Artemis is not an easy cat to understand. She's got issues."

Her mother finished her tea and set the mug down on the coffee table. "I don't think anybody would expect you to instantly turn into an expert under these circumstances, Sophie. I'm sure Carrie wouldn't. In fact, if I remember Carrie correctly, I'm sure she'd think the whole thing was pretty funny."

Sophie felt the corners of her mouth creep into a smile. Carrie would be seriously tickled by everything that had happened this evening.

"I'm sure you'll pick it up eventually, a capable girl like you," her mother reassured her.

"Eventually, maybe," Sophie conceded. "But not in two weeks."

Five.

Aunty Sophie!" Sophie opened one reluctant eye and looked at Izzy. She felt like she had been asleep for a total of forty-seven minutes. "Psssssst, Aunty Sophie," Izzy whispered at the top of her voice. "Wake up, wake up. I want breakfast. I want Cheerios and Shreddies and Crispies and Coco Pops and milk!" Izzy's eyes widened as she spoke in clear anticipation of the delights that her cereal feast would bring. She would be unlucky, though. Sophie did not eat breakfast and so did not have any of the cereals on Izzy's optimistic list. She didn't even have any bread anymore-they'd eaten it all last night.

Sitting up, Sophie rubbed her eyes and looked at her watch. It was just before 6:00 A.M. It turned out that she had been asleep for a total of forty-seven minutes.

Her mother had left just after eleven, and Sophie had been sitting on the edge of the sofa wondering exactly how she had come to this point in her life when she had heard a loud buzzing. For a few moments she'd thought the day was being topped off nicely with an invasion of giant killer wasps. Then she'd realized it was her cell phone vibrating on the coffee table. Nobody ever called on it outside office hours. Its loud thrum against the blond ash had been rather disconcerting. Sophie had picked it up and looked at the display; it had said "Number withheld." Compulsively unable to leave a phone unanswered, Sophie had pressed the Call button.

"Hello?" she'd said uncertainly.

"Sophie?" It was Jake Flynn's voice. Sophie had looked at her watch. Jake at this hour?

"Look, I know it's late, and I've been wondering about calling you all night," he'd said quickly. "I wanted to see how you were. I nearly didn't call you, but then I thought if I were you, I'd be sitting up all night worrying. Tell me to go away if you like, but I thought you might like someone to talk to."

Sophie had chewed her lip. "Um, no-thanks for calling. It's very...nice of you," she'd said. She would have to ring Cal in the morning and ask him to verify, but she was fairly sure that phone calls at this hour of the night were quite a good indicator of Jake being interested in her on more than just a business level.

But what if he did like her? She had had a secret and happily unattainable crush on him for sometime now. But that was when he was just her most important client. Not a man who phoned her late at night to ask her how she was. If he did like her like that, what did it mean? How would she feel abut him then? A real, three-dimensional, fleshy version of him that would want her in the real world instead of when she was daydreaming in the bath?

Sophie's labored thought processes had crashed, and she'd shut her eyes for a moment to reboot. He still might not fancy her. He could just be being American again. Americans were famous for not being very good at observing boundaries. That was always a possibility.

"So how are you coping?" Jake had asked her, and Sophie had realized that he was the first person to ask her that.

"I don't really know, Jake, there's so much to take in. I mean, Carrie's gone..." Sophie had paused to listen to those words out loud again. She still could not make sense of them. "It's a bit surreal," she'd finished after a moment. The mistress of understatement, Cal called her.

"You know you're not alone, don't you?" Jake had asked her.

"I know," Sophie had said. "I've got this Tess woman, the social worker, and Cal and Lisa will handle everything in the office until I can get back in. You don't have to worry, Jake, I won't let anything get in the way of-"

"That's not what I meant," he'd said. Sophie had heard him breathe out. "Look, Sophie, I really like you, and just in case you were in any doubt about what I mean by 'like you,' I mean I like you in a nonbusiness, personal kind of way. I'm very attracted to you."

"Oh," Sophie had said. That cleared that up then.

"I know you have a lot going on now, and maybe I should be stepping back and letting you get on with things, but like I said, I really like you, Sophie. I don't want to let this go before it's had a chance to become something else. Something that might be really great. I understand that right now you just can't think about anything like that, so in the meantime I want to be your friend. I guess that's why I'm calling you at this hour of the night, to put my cards on the table. To let you know I like you and that if you need me I'm here for you." Jake had laughed. "I'm hoping you'll be so impressed by my chivalry you'll fall for me and let me take you out on a date once all the dust has settled."

There had been a short pause in which Sophie had realized that Jake had been asking her a question. "Of course," she'd said automatically.

"And I was thinking I could come by and take you all out one day. To the zoo or something? I have all this vacation time coming to me, and after all, I'm the boss. I'm sure I can give myself a day off on short notice."

"That would be lovely," Sophie had said, her mind still on the fact that Jake Flynn definitely "liked" her, which left just one question-did she definitely like him?

"So-it's okay if I call you on a nonbusiness footing?" Jake had asked her again, just to be totally clear.

"It is," Sophie had said, painfully aware of her stilted responses.

"Then good night, Sophie," Jake had said, and that time he'd said her name it had sounded different.

"Night," Sophie had said, and he'd hung up the phone.

Sophie had then sat on the edge of the sofa with her phone in her hand and wondered about how different her day might have been if Tess Andrew hadn't turned up. She wondered if Jake would have been so open and up front at their lunch date. She wondered if he had, if they might have met that evening for dinner and he might have escorted her home. She closed her eyes and tried to imagine him kissing her and then opened them quickly again. It wasn't that she wasn't attracted to Jake, but she was glad in a way that this obstacle had thrown itself up between them. Speculating on what might or might not happen with Jake was far too complicated to fit into her present worrying schedule. She had so many other things to worry about. Abandoned children, absent fathers, dead best friends. Sophie's stomach clenched as she ran down the list.

She decided to worry about her cat instead. It was far less worrying.

And so she had lain awake on the slightly too short and rather smelly sofa for most of the night, worrying about Artemis. Artemis liked her routine, she did not like disruption of any kind, it seriously freaked her out. For all the tough and together front she put on, all the girl-about-town swaggering she did, she was a bit of scaredy-cat when it came down to it. She was not keen to be nudged out of her comfort zone. Sophie was worried that she wouldn't come back, that she would take the children's invasion as a breach of trust between woman and cat and leg it forever to live life on the road, murdering small mammals along the way. She didn't want Artemis to leave her. Despite her being the world's most unfriendly pet, Sophie would miss Artemis sitting on what had become her very own armchair, casting Sophie the occasional imperious glance.

Even Sophie, who was not someone who needed a comfort zone, was feeling the pressure. Ordinarily she embraced change and welcomed a challenge. She just wasn't keen on ones that came out of the blue in nothing more than slight frothy fairy dresses.

Fortunately, Artemis did come back, just before 5:00 A.M., which Sophie considered something of a step forward in their relationship, because it meant that the cat must have wanted to come home enough to come through the bedroom window, even though she would have known the girls were sleeping in there. Getting her priorities right, the cat had gone into the kitchen, and Sophie had listened to her eat what was left of her food and have a drink of water. A few moments later, Artemis had stalked into the living room and regarded Sophie with a look of pure recrimination before leaping on to the armchair and curling up on its cushion with her back turned on Sophie, who was somehow comforted by the snub.

Sophie had looked at the ceiling and, for the first time in the last nearly twenty-four hours, allowed herself to think about Carrie. Closing her eyes, she'd pictured her friend the last time she had seen her, three years ago. Small but curvy, with dark honey curls and hazel eyes that glittered when she laughed, and she was always laughing. She'd tied her hair up in a bandanna and worn a pair of paint-splattered dungarees over a T-shirt top. She'd teased Sophie for fretting about the upholstery in her beloved car as Sophie drove Carrie and her sticky children to the station to catch the train back to Cornwall.

"Call me if you need me," Sophie had told Carrie as she helped her with her luggage onto the platform. "Call me anyway, but call if me you need me too-any time, okay?"

Carrie had laughed as she threw her bag onto the train with no regard for who or what it might hit. "Always, forever, whatever-right?" she'd said, hugging Sophie as she reminded her of their ancient pact.

"Exactly," Sophie had replied, not quite able to say it back to her for fear of sounding a bit cheesy.

"Let's see each other really soon, okay? I mean, I know your life is one constant social whirl, but I'm sure you can find time to see us somewhere," Carrie had said.

Sophie had known that Carrie was being gently sarcastic, because although her job did guarantee at least three parties a month, her life outside the office had dwindled to almost nothing.

And Carrie had been right. It wasn't that she didn't have friends out there who wanted to see her and whom she wanted to see. It was just that something always came up at work to prevent it happening, and nine times out of ten she would have to cancel at the last minute. Carrie had lived a couple of hundred miles away, but Sophie had other friends she was just as bad at keeping up with. Christina and Sue from the gym, who both lived in Islington, for example. She hadn't seen either of them in months, and they were practically neighbors. And she'd been supposed to meet the McCarthy Hughes olds girls for a drink on every fourth Thursday, but the last time she had made it, it was just after last call and all she could do was kiss her friends on the cheek as she exchanged hurried news in the line for a taxi.

"You have to let you hair down more," her recently engaged friend and former colleague Angie had told her. "Don't let McCarthy Hughes run your life. You don't want to turn into Gillian!"

Sophie had laughed but secretly thought that, actually, she did.

Still, Sophie remembered thinking as she had said good-bye, Carrie was different. Carrie was her best friend and as much a part of her life as her mum was-if not more. No one knew her like Carrie did. She had to make more of an effort.

"Let's not let another two or three years go by again," she had said sincerely. "Let's not. I never remember how much I miss you until I see you."

"I'm going to take that as a compliment," Carrie said with a grin. When the train pulled out of the station, Bella and Carrie had pressed their noses against the window and crossed their eyes as Sophie waved good-bye. Sophie had never seen Carrie again. It was possible, probable even, that if Carrie hadn't died, she would never have seen any of her friend's family again, because as soon as she had remembered how important Carrie was to her, she had forgotten it too.

"I'm sorry, mate," Sophie had whispered, "I really am remembering how much I miss you now, believe me." And then seventeen hours of drama had overcome her at last and she'd finally fallen asleep.

That had been forty-eight minutes ago. Right now Izzy was repeating her breakfast order with increasing urgency. Sophie looked over at the armchair. Artemis was no longer in it, lucky cat.

"Okay, okay," she said, holding the palm of her hand in front of Izzy's face. "Shush." Izzy did shush. Her eye filled with tears, and her lips quivered perilously.

"No!" Sophie said quickly in a conciliatory tone, instantly fearing the wailing and screaming and holding of breath again. "No, no, no, no. Don't cry, Izzy! Aunty Sophie wasn't telling you off, no! Because you are a lovely good girl, aren't you?" Izzy nodded and sniffed in a deep, damp breath. "Yes, yes you are-super-duper good excellent good grown-up girl who isn't going to cry, are you?" Sophie nodded at the child encouragingly, and returning her nod, Izzy climbed without invitation onto Sophie's lap and wound her arms around Sophie's neck until her runny nose teeming with a billion odd germs was only millimeters from Sophie's wrinkled one. That was Sophie's main objection to the whole physical-displays-of-affection thing-it was just so unhygienic.

"I'll be a good girl for you, Aunty Sophie," Izzy said, picking up a thick strand of Sophie's hair and winding it around her fist. "I'll be your friend and we will all be happy and you don't be cross, okay?"

Sophie nodded. She knew that any normal woman would be charmed and delighted by the comment-so why did she feel like it was a Mafioso-style threat?

"It's a deal," she said uncertainly.

"I'll kiss you now, okay?" Izzy said, and without waiting for consent, she pressed her slimy face against Sophie's tensed cheek, leaving her damp noseprint just under one of Sophie's twitching eyes. "Breakfast now. I want Cheerios and..."

Sophie wiped the sleeve of her pajama top across her cheek and was contemplating how to break the no breakfast news to Izzy when she saw the walking pile of laundry that was approaching though the living room door. Bella dropped the sheets onto the rug.

"Izzy wet the bed," she said a little anxiously. "It wasn't me."

Sophie felt the damp of the fairy dress skirt begin to seep through her pajama bottoms. She didn't doubt Bella, all the evidence supported her case. Sophie took a deep breath. She wasn't going to get stressed about it. It was just wee on her leg. It wouldn't kill her. It probably wouldn't kill her, although she might have to look that up on the Internet just to make sure. She'd just have to get changed, put these pajamas in the laundry hamper, and buy a new bed after they'd gone, that's all. And new bedclothes and a new sofa and new cushions and new rugs. She wondered if the presence of a dead friend's children was an acceptable risk on her homeowners insurance. If it wasn't, it should have been.

Sophie lifted Izzy off her lap and sat her on the fragrant pile of sheets, where she could do the least damage.

"Okay," she said to both girls. "Only thirteen days to go." Both children stared blankly at her. "What I mean is, I have no food in the house. We'll have to go out for breakfast. Luckily, there's a twenty-four-hour Sainsbury's at Manor House. We'll get dressed. We'll go there, okay?"

"Okay!" both girls said.

"I'm hungry," Izzy said, glumly. "I'm starving."

"I know," Sophie said. "Which is why we have to get ready extra quickly, okay? And why we have to do everything that Aunty Sophie says, okay?" Sophie stared at both the girls as if she could hypnotically implant obedience into them. They stared back at her. She formulated a plan.

Of course Sophie's plan, which was to empty Izzy's treacherous bladder completely and get everyone out of the flat before malnutrition set in, did not work.

This is what happened instead.

Sophie sat Izzy on the toilet and told her not to move until she came back. She returned to her bedroom to dress and found Bella holding one of her Manolos in one hand and balancing precariously on the other with one foot. Sophie regarded the scene as if she had just come across Bella with her finger in the pin of a live grenade.

"Nooooo!" Sophie shouted commando style and, in her head at least, in slow motion.

Bella's face fell, and she slumped on the bed facefirst, letting the shoe drop to the floor, from where Sophie scooped it up and cradled it momentarily before realizing that she had things a little out of perspective. She had been about to offer Bella a go at her low-heeled pumps when a clatter and a scream sounded from the bathroom. The Manolo was abandoned once again as Sophie realized her rookie error of leaving Izzy alone in the bathroom for longer than a nanosecond. She found Izzy jammed securely in the toilet, her calf sticking out at a right angle from the seat and wriggling furiously, her face and upper torso caked in Sophie's expensive makeup collection.

Which meant another bath. And which Sophie was sure would mean another tantrum.

In any event, though, Izzy was amazingly contrite and even allowed Sophie to remove the offending fairy dress, which was now beyond all help, as long as Sophie promised to replace it with an identical one. Sophie chose not to worry about the logistics of that promise, concentrating only on the results it got.

Eventually she dressed in the bedroom, alongside both girls. Bella selected from the girls' single suitcase a pair of red leggings with yellow dots, an electric blue T-shirt, a lime green cardigan, and a pink cotton ruffled mini-skirt to finish the outfit off. And, robbed of her fairy dress, Izzy carefully picked out items of clothing that were entirely yellow.

In the meantime, Sophie struggled to find clothes that were suitable for taking two small children to the supermarket. Sensible clothes were not Sophie's strong point. Almost everything she bought was chosen to go to the office or a function in. And everything she bought was chosen with a particular pair of shoes in mind. Sophie put shoes first. If she saw a wonderful pair that she had absolutely nothing to wear with, she would buy them anyway. In her experience, shoes were like fashion magnets. The right clothes would simply be drawn to them. Sophie was especially proud of this philosophy she had invented all on her own, although she did have to admit that it sometimes took a lot of hard shopping to reach outfit Nirvana. Consequently, Sophie was limited on casual wear, principally because she didn't do much casual wearing.

Eventually she found a pair of jeans that she had forgotten she had and possessed only because she had felt compelled to help her mum redecorate the house last year with washable stainproof paint. After some rooting about in the backs of her drawers, she found an old pink Calvin Klein T-shirt that had the logo spelled out in diamantes, which she pulled reluctantly over her head.

Sophie looked at her shoe rack, which was neatly attached to the inside of her wardrobe door, and scanned her shoes. The most sensible and expendable pair of shoes she had were from River Island, low kitten heels in magenta pink with pointed toes and a thin strap that crossed each toe horizontally, ending in a tiny bow.

Once, only yesterday in fact-although it seemed like a dim memory now-it had amused her no end that such a pair of shoes were her most sensible ones. Now it dismayed her. Not because she wished she were better prepared for all scenarios but because she wished that her life was back to normal.

When the threesome finally emerged from the flat, Sophie felt curiously triumphant, as if she had survived an apocalypse.

The thing is, she decided, squinting slightly in the glare of the bright winter sun, to keep your nerve. If I can just do that, it'll be a breeze.