‘It was my baby,’ he snaps, his voice breaking, and I shake my head.

‘You don’t get to choose.’

He takes a step forward. ‘I didn’t want to choose.’ There are tears shining in his eyes. ‘I wanted to know, I wanted to support you in your choice … I wanted—’

The sound of his phone makes us both jump and when he pulls it out, I see his girlfriend’s name flashing on the screen.

‘Just give me one second, OK? Don’t move, wait there,’ he says, motioning to me with one hand before turning to take the call.

‘Hi, babe …’

As he walks away, just far enough that his voice is out of reach, I move my gaze back to the London skyscape and take a deep breath.

Reaching into my pocket, I pull a cigarette from the packet. With one final glance across the horizon I turn and walk down the hill, away from the policemen with their dogs, and away from Morley, without looking back.

Chapter 67

Gabriela

After that first night at home, the week of her return, she struggled to sleep. While Tom lay beside her, dead to the world, she stared at the ceiling, clinging to the duvet, imagining Layla on the other side of London, without her. Less than two months ago she was still inside her body; how would she cope now? Where would she think her mother had gone?

There were things she had prepared for, knowing as she had that she would not always be able to be there. She had mixed breast and bottle-feeding from the start for fear she would be unable to wean her baby off in time for her to leave, though it pulled against her every instinct to lure her away from her body, to stop her latching on when she went for the nipple. She had been ready for that, along with the tales she had been prepared to tell to explain away the abdominal scar if for any reason the birth had ended up needing a C-section. Though in the end she hadn’t.

The birth itself had passed with relative ease, in the corporate environs of the private hospital Ivan had paid for, but there were things she hadn’t anticipated, things so fundamental that she had not let herself so much as imagine them. At the forefront of it all was the sense of all-consuming loss: the intangible but unavoidable fact that everything about this was completely wrong.

There were smaller things, too, that caught her off-guard. Her inability to remember any of the milestones of early motherhood meant that though she had already done it twice before, Gabriela seemed to have no recollection of the stages at which anything was supposed to happen. The unknowing of it, the constant cycle of surprises, amazed and terrified her.