From chapter one:

Emma Tuesday, March 20, 2012

My computer is winking at me knowingly when I sit down at my desk. I touch the keyboard, and a photo of Paul appears on my screen. It's the one I took of him in Rome on our honeymoon, eyes full of love across a table in the Campo dei Fiori. I try to smile back at him but as I lean in, I catch a glimpse of my reflection in the screen and stop. I hate seeing myself without warning. Don't recognize myself sometimes. You think you know what you look like and there is this stranger looking at you. It can frighten me.

But today I study the stranger's face. The brown hair half pulled up on top of the head in a frantic work bun, naked skin, shadows and lines creeping towards the eyes like cracks in a pavement. "Christ, you look awful," I tell the woman on the screen. The movement of her mouth mesmerizes me and I make her speak some more.

"Come on, Emma, get some work done," she says. I smile palely at her and she smiles back.

"This is mad behavior," she tells me in my own voice, and I stop. Thank God Paul can't see me now, I think.

When Paul gets home tonight, he's tired and a bit grumpy after a day of "boneheaded" undergraduates and another row with his department head over the timetable.

Maybe it's an age thing, but it seems to really shake Paul to be challenged at work these days. I think he must be starting to doubt himself, see threats to his position everywhere. University departments are like prides of lions, really. Lots of males preening and screwing around and hanging on to their superiority by their dewclaws. I say all the right things and make him a gin and tonic.

When I move his briefcase off the sofa, I see he's brought home a copy of the Evening Standard. He must've picked it up on the tube.

I sit and read it while he showers away the cares of the day, and it's then I see the paragraph about the baby.