Nora went very quiet for about ten seconds, which is what she does, and then said: “You can ask.

You don’t have to look.”

And from that afternoon, for about eight months, I asked.

Out loud, in shops, at school gates, at a birthday party in front of nine other parents: “Which one am I talking to?”

And one of them would say her name, and we would carry on.

It became a thing between the three of us.

It became, for a while, a game — Maya went through a phase of answering wrongly, which she found hilarious and which Nora found intolerable.