April got out flour from the cupboard, cracked eggs into a bowl. She read the recipe, read it again, although she’d made the dish many times before. Each afternoon when she got home from work she made pasta from scratch, whole-baked fish, slow-cooked tagines with preserved lemon. April had known nothing about searing meat or the right way to chop an onion until well into adulthood. Her own mother hated cooking, and April and Pip had grown up on meat and three veg, Chinese takeaway on Friday nights. But now April found the incremental amassing of basic skills to be satisfying, like collecting tiny nuggets of gold.

They ate late that night—buttery ravioli in front of the television—and watched the men’s quarter-final. Nate always asked April why she bothered, said he couldn’t tell the difference between fresh pasta and the stuff from the packet.