For all Gabriela’s panic, though, for all the sense that she simply wasn’t ready, Sadie seemed to know what to do. From the moment she lay in her mother’s arms, conscientiously showing up on her due date, it was as though it was Sadie who was leading the charge. It was as if, Gabriela had thought briefly, her daughter didn’t need her at all.

‘So this is your first pregnancy?’ the consultant asked as she and Ivan settled in her office in the private clinic he had insisted on. Gabriela held the doctor’s eye, not knowing then how much a scan could reveal, but understanding it would break patient confidentiality for the doctor to contradict anything she said, or reveal her in another way to Ivan who, though responsible for the fees, was not, after all, the patient.

Gabriela was still for a moment and then she nodded.

Turning suddenly to Ivan, she said, ‘I’m sorry, I’m really thirsty. Is there any chance you could grab me a bottle of water from the machine?’

He paused for a moment and she sensed a flicker of resentment at being given a chore – or perhaps he was wondering why she hadn’t accepted his offer of a drink five minutes earlier. But then, feeling the eyes of the doctor on him, he smiled stiffly. ‘Of course.’

As he left the room she leaned forward and said, as quietly as she could, ‘It’s not my first baby.’

The doctor didn’t flinch. ‘OK. Perhaps you and I should arrange an appointment for just the two of us? Next week?’

Gabriela nodded, taking the business card from the woman’s outstretched hand, just as the door handle rotated and Ivan walked back into the room.

‘The machine is broken. We’ll have to get some in a moment.’

‘There’s a fountain in the reception area,’ the doctor said, berating herself. ‘Sorry, I should have said.’

‘Is there something you’re not telling me?’ Ivan asked as she scrambled in her handbag in the doorway of the Portland, on their way out.

‘I can’t find my sunglasses,’ she said, panic rising in her voice as she searched for the oversized tortoiseshell frames she’d bought a couple of weeks earlier with money from her allowance.

‘You must have left them at home,’ he said and instinctively she pulled at her coat and wide-brimmed hat, feeling exposed in this central part of town.

‘I had them!’ she snapped, and the couple passing into the revolving doors started slightly at the sound of a raised voice.

‘Oh, they’re here.’ The relief jolted her back into the present, away from the possibility of her children, heading into town on a school trip, turning a corner and finding the mother who was supposed to be in Moscow standing just miles from their home, with a strange man.