When she turned to Ivan, her sunglasses now shielding her eyes, he was looking at her with a pained expression.

‘Gabriela, I’m worried about you.’

‘Oh, come on, I panicked because I’d lost my new glasses, it’s hardly something to—’

‘I’m not talking about your glasses,’ he said, pulling her arm gently so that they were facing one another in the street, people all around them.

‘Do you want this baby?’

‘What?’ Her voice was clipped. She moved closer to him. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘It’s a simple question.’

It was, and it stopped her dead. Do I want this baby?

‘Yes,’ she said, her head moving up and down of its own accord. ‘I do.’

‘Why?’

His voice was completely even as though it was the most natural question in the world.

‘Why what? For God’s sake, Ivan, you’re—’

He didn’t rise to her bait. ‘Why do you want this baby, Gabriela?’

She shrugged. ‘Because I want the chance to be a mother.’

Chapter 54

Gabriela

Six Months Later

‘It’s a beautiful day, let’s go for a drive,’ Ivan suggested one morning when Layla was barely a month old, walking into the bedroom with a tray and pulling open the curtains. The coffee and the biscuits he had bought back from a recent trip to Vienna were laid out with Polina’s signature precision.

Polina was a person whose age it was almost impossible to guess. Perhaps so many years of servitude had stripped her of any personal defining characteristics; above all else, she was Ivan’s housekeeper. And yet, Gabriela felt, it was hard to look at her without trying to catch a glimpse of the person she managed so successfully to mask.

If she had to guess, Gabriela would have placed her somewhere between her mid-thirties and late forties, though it was difficult to see her as a contemporary, able as she was to do things that, no matter what age Gabriela reached, she was doubtful she could ever master. The sort of things that women were supposed to know, not least when it came to children.

Sometimes she wondered if Polina had ever had a son or a daughter of her own. Somehow, it felt wrong to ask. Or perhaps it was the answer that she feared, the uncomfortable possibility that she’d had to abandon her own child in order to look after theirs. Whatever the truth, Gabriela was sure she could never have done this without her.

‘Go where?’ she asked Ivan, stifling a yawn.

It had been a night of a thousand feeds, all of which Ivan had been immune to as he slept through with ear plugs in the spare room, and Layla was snoozing in the bed next to Gabriela now.

He leaned down to kiss their daughter tenderly on her forehead, and Gabriela whispered, ‘Don’t, you’ll wake her.’