‘Like I said in Moscow, I suppose I just assumed that once you had the baby you’d feel differently,’ he said again when she asked him what was wrong, refusing to meet her eye.

She had studied him long and hard last night, waiting for him to tell her it was OK, but he simply leaned down and kissed their daughter on the head, and walked out. By the time she woke up, he’d already gone.

It was only once she was in the cab home that she realised her mistake. She had been reaching in her bag for her phone – anything to distract herself from the baby screaming for her on the other side of the city – when she felt her fingers land on the bunny’s fur. As she pulled the toy from the bag, instantly she knew what she’d done.

She had almost forgotten Otto entirely, but when she moved past Layla’s room the previous evening as she prepared to leave, escaping to the relative serenity of the top of the house after her fight with Ivan, she spotted the bunny abandoned on the shelf, slumped over in the half-light. Creeping into the room, careful not to wake her daughter, she’d lifted it up and placed it discreetly under her arm.

In the hall, she’d heard Ivan’s footsteps following her up the stairs and she’d moved quickly back into their bedroom, stuffing the toy in the bottom of her bag and placing her make-up and book on top to obscure it, should Ivan for any reason glance inside at the contents.

But as soon as she drew it out now, she knew what had happened.

Briefly, she remembered the That’s Not My … touch-and-feel books which she’d read repeatedly to Callum when he was little, borrowed from the same library in which she had spent hours when she was young. Closing her eyes, she imagined him on her knee as she regaled him with the details revealing how this particular item wasn’t the narrator’s lion or pirate or train.

With a rising sense of panic, she pictured her son. There was no way he would see this toy and not know immediately that it was not his Otto.

Her voice breaking, she called out to the driver as the car idled along Kentish Town High Street. ‘Can you stop, please? I need to run into McDonald’s quickly.’

Inside, she moved towards the counter. ‘Do you have any jam?’

Noting the attendant’s expression, she continued, ‘OK, I’ll have a Big Mac, with ketchup, please.’