‘Just to the loo, going to try doing a piss without pulling out a stitch, if that’s all right with you?’ she snapped and he winced.

‘Sorry,’ he said, looking hurt.

‘It’s fine. I know you’re just trying to help.’ She brushed his head with her fingertips as she passed. And he was, but the more he tried to do for her the more she wished he would back the hell off.

It wasn’t fair, to find herself aggrieved by his constant offers of help, to feel a swell of resentment for the disproportionate impact of their daughter’s birth on her life compared to his, for how liberated he was to enjoy their new circumstances free from the physical and hormonal shifts of becoming a mother. Yet some days the rage she felt towards him was so great she would fathom excuses to leave the house: an imagined errand she’d announce before heading out to sit on a bench on the Heath, smoking a cigarette. And then she’d come home and find Tom and Sadie asleep on the sofa, his body curled protectively around hers, and she would find herself suddenly overwhelmed by a surge of love. Hating herself, she would sit and watch her daughter’s tiny fingers clutching Tom’s thumb as if she sensed that something was coming for them in this world she had suddenly been propelled into, and she had to hold on for dear life. The urge Gabriela felt to protect her child, to protect all of them, in those moments, was so strong, so all-consuming, that she couldn’t imagine that anything would ever tear them apart. She couldn’t have foreseen the force of the wave that would sweep them all up, and then spit them out again so far from home.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘I can’t get the breast pump to work,’ she said, pushing at the valve that was failing to connect to the tube, the evening before she was due to go back to work.

‘What’s wrong with it?’ Tom asked, taking it from her gently.

‘I don’t know what’s wrong with it, that’s the problem,’ she snapped, and Tom held up his hands.

‘Just trying to help.’

‘Massive help,’ she muttered under her breath as he moved out of the line of fire, putting on the kettle, because all any of them ever needed was a cup of fucking tea.

‘I just don’t know how I’m supposed to work properly when I can’t think straight, when my tits explode every time she makes a bloody noise,’ she cried later, once Sadie was down for the night and it was just him and her on the sofa making their way through the remains of the previous night’s takeaway.

‘Are you sure you want to go back so soon?’

‘Seriously, Tom, is that supposed to be helpful?’