No one ever died from lack of sleep, Mia had said. Maybe not, but you could go mad without it. The previous night, my fourth without sleep—even though I’d taken Mia’s melatonin—I’d felt trapped, like a rat in my own head, where time kept jumping—I’d forget what had happened, thinking I was still pregnant, waiting to give birth, only to discover that it was all over, but I had no baby, then I’d tumble into horror.

I prayed and prayed for sleep, to not go mad.

This morning, when Luke had brought me tea he’d seemed lighter somehow.

I dragged myself up to sitting, exhausted and queasy.

‘You didn’t sleep?’ He was very surprised. ‘Not even with Mia’s melatonin? You mean that from midnight to seven a.m. you literally didn’t nod off once? Are you sure?’ For the first time he had sounded impatient about it.

The heat on my face dimmed—the sun had gone behind a cloud—so I opened my eyes and looked around the park. It was a small, scrappy affair, but it was the closest to our apartment.

In the playground, a man with a weighty little bundle strapped to his chest sat on a swing. Gently he rocked back and forth, talking to the bump…

…and for a moment I was wondering if that really was a baby on his chest? What if he was chatting away with a bag of potatoes or his sweatshirt rolled up in a ball? It was a strange idea, almost funny, and maybe that was the thing about having had almost no sleep in five days—everything felt off, slightly mad, as if I was dreaming.

Then I spotted a baby in a stroller headed towards me. My first urge was to get up and run away—I was afraid of getting too close to what I had lost—but a horrible fascination kept me frozen in place. Closer it got, then closer, the mommy walking jauntily and singing a song.

The baby was near enough now for me to touch. We made eye contact as it passed, it was maybe three months old, squishy and milk-drunk.

In a second or two, the stroller was gone. I watched the retreating mommy in her Birkenstocks, wondering what it was like to be her, with her healthy baby. Did she know how incredibly blessed she was? For a moment I thought I was imagining it but she was deliberately squeezing her buttocks with every step she took. I guessed that that accounted for the jauntiness of her walk. Not happiness, as I’d first thought, but an attempt to ‘snap back to her pre-baby body’.