Sam Baker - The Stepmothers’ Support Group

‘Hannah, Sophie, Alfie, this is Eve Owen, the friend I’ve told you about.’

Eve smiled.

‘Eve, this is my eldest, Hannah, she’s twelve, Sophie is eight. And Alfie, he’s five.’

‘And two months,’ Alfie said firmly. The matter corrected, he returned to twisting Spiderman’s leg to see how far it would turn before dislocating at the hip.

Smiling inanely, Eve felt like a children’s TV presenter.

‘Hello,’ she said.

Three faces stared at her.

‘I’m Eve,’ she added unnecessarily, putting out a hand to the girl sitting nearest. Hannah might be twelve, but she looked older. Already teenage inside her head. And way taller than four feet. She exuded confidence. ‘Hannah, really nice to meet you.’

‘Hi.’ Hannah raised one hand, in token greeting, then used it to flick long, shiny golden hair over her shoulder, before reaching pointedly for her cappuccino.

‘And you must be Sophie.’

The child in the middle was a smaller, slightly prettier and much girlier version of her sister. Except for Levi jeans, there was nothing she wore, from Converse boots to Barbie hair slides that wasn’t pink.

‘How do you do?’ Sophie said carefully. She shook Eve’s hand, before glancing at her father for approval. He nodded.

‘I’m Alfie,’ the boy said.

‘Hello Alfie.’

‘Do you like Spiderman or Power Rangers? I like Power Rangers, but Spiderman is all right. You can be Venom.’ Recovering a plastic figure from the floor, he shoved it into Eve’s outstretched hand.

‘That’s kind,’ she said, feeling stupidly grateful.

‘Don’t be so sure,’ said Ian, tousling the boy’s hair until the tufts stuck up even more. ‘All that means is your figure gets bashed.’

‘Venom’s the baddie,’ said Alfie, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. ‘He has to lose, it’s the law. Can we eat our cakes now, Dad?’

Without waiting for permission, he grabbed the nearest éclair, one twice as big as his hand, and thrust it mouthwards, decorating his face, Joker-style, with chocolate and cream.

‘Sit, sit, sit,’ Ian said, pulling out the empty chair between his own and Hannah’s. ‘I’ll get you a coffee. Black, isn’t it?’

You know it’s black, she wanted to say. When has it ever been anything else?

She didn’t say it, though. And she resisted the urge to touch his hand to tell him everything would be all right. Hand squeezing was out of bounds. As was reassuring arm touching and even the most formal of pecks on the cheek. They’d been lovers for nine months, but this was something new and Eve was still learning the rules.

This was more than girl meets boy, girl fancies boy, girl goes out with boy, falls in love, etc…This was girl meets boy, girl fancies boy, girl goes out with boy, girl discovers boy has already gone out with another girl, girl meets boy’s children.

In other words, this was serious.

Eve never expected to fall for a married man. Well, widowed, to be more accurate. But married, widowed, divorced…It just hadn’t occurred to her this was something she’d do. In fact, like boob jobs, Botox and babies, it was one of those things she’d always have said, No way .

But then she’d stepped off an escalator, into Starbucks, on the second floor of Borders on Oxford Street over a year earlier. It had been Ian’s choice, not her idea of a good venue for an interview; too noisy, too public, too easy to be overheard. She’d stepped off the escalator, seen him at a table reading Atonement , her favourite book at the time, and felt a lurch in her stomach that said she was about to commit a cardinal sin.

He was tall and slim, with a largish nose, made more obvious by his recently cropped hair. But it was the brooding intensity with which he read his book that attracted her. Before he’d even looked up, she’d fallen for her interview subject.

She never expected to fall for a married man.

Eve ran that back. Actually, she’d worked hard not to fall for anyone. She could count on one hand the number of lovers she’d had in the last ten years. And she didn’t need any hands at all to count the number whose leaving had given her so much as a sleepless night.

She had her job, features director on a major magazine at thirty-two, and, apart from one serious relationship in her first year at university, she’d never let anyone get in the way of what she wanted to do. And, if she was honest, she hadn’t let that get in the way, had she?

So, falling for Ian Newsome was more than a surprise. It was a shock.

Life didn’t get messy immediately.

Caroline had been dead for nine months when Eve interviewed Ian; and it was another six months before they ended up in bed. All right, five months, two weeks and three days. But from the minute he stood up, in his jeans and suit jacket, to pull back her chair, Eve was hooked. And during that first meeting he wasn’t even the most accommodating of interview subjects.

He hadn’t wanted to do the interview at all. He was there, surrounded by tourists, two floors above Oxford Street, under duress. Caroline’s publishers had insisted. Precious Moments , a collection of her columns documenting a three-year battle with breast cancer was due for publication on the first anniversary of her death. And Ian was morally, not to mention contractually, obliged to promote it.

Since a large percentage of the money was going to the Macmillan Trust, which had provided the cancer nurses who had seen Caroline through her last days, how could he refuse?

It was a given that The Times , Caroline’s old paper, would extract it; so he agreed to an interview with their Saturday magazine to launch the extract, plus one further interview. Of all the countless requests, he had chosen Beau , the women’s glossy where Eve was features director.

The first thing he’d said was, ‘Can I get you a coffee?’ (Eve recognized it for the power play it was, but let him anyway.) The second was, ‘I won’t allow the kids to be photographed.’ He fixed Eve with a chilly blue gaze as she took a tentative sip of her scalding Americano and felt the roof of her mouth blister.

Great start.

‘I’m sorry,’ Eve said, hearing her voice slide into ‘case study’ mode. ‘But we’ll need something.’ She tried not to run her tongue over the blister. ‘I did make that clear to your publicist right from the start.’

Ian’s mouth set into a tight line. So tight, his lips almost disappeared. ‘And I made it clear,’ he said. ‘No photography would be allowed. That was my condition. After all they’ve been through, losing their mother and…And everything. Well, protecting them, giving them some…normality. That’s the most important thing. I’m sure you understand.’

‘Of course, I do.’

Eve forced a smile, racking her brains for a way to salvage the interview. She did understand, but she also understood that Miriam, her editor, would kill her if she came back empty-handed. There were pictures of Caroline they could buy from The Times, obviously enough. Also pap shots, taken when she was leaving hospital. Only Miriam would want something new. Something personal. Something that would strike a chord with Beau ’s readers, many of whom were in their thirties. The point at which Caroline had discovered, while feeding Alfie, that she had a lump in her breast. A lump that turned out to be what everyone thought was a not-especially life-threatening form of cancer.

Eve thought fast. She only had an hour with the guy. The last thing she needed was to spend half of it squabbling over pictures. Then it dawned on her. ‘You’re a photographer? I bet your family album is stunning. How about a snap of Caroline with the kids, when they were much younger, before she was ill? The children would scarcely be recognizable. Your youngest, Alfie, would still be a baby. Surely that wouldn’t infringe their privacy?’