No Regrets

Priya Desai is forty-seven, formidable and entirely alone, which is exactly how she likes it. She has a white apartment with the whole of the Harbour Bridge in the window, a seat on more boards than she can count, and a rule about children: she doesn't do them.

Then her friend Mel talks her into judging a Year Four pitch competition. Priya makes a nine-year-old cry over the margins on her lemonade, and the tall, rumpled man at the side of the hall is not impressed. Daniel Okafor is a teacher, and the father of the nine-year-old twins whose pitch is an app that catches dads hiding zucchini. The prize, it turns out, is four mentoring sessions. With her.

Priya hasn't let anyone into her life in thirty years, not since the summer she was seventeen and she held a baby girl for one hour and then gave her up. She has never told her four best friends.

And now a quiet young woman with round glasses has started working Saturdays at Mel's nursery, and she keeps watching Priya as if she knows something.