In the hours that passed, Lucy and Aidan were able to hold Catherine. Lucy carefully dressed her in the premature baby sleepsuit dotted with yellow daisies that despite being small, still swamped her. A nurse took photos of them all. Faces stiff, hearts breaking, a family of three, not four, and it occurred to Aidan that’s what they’d be now. The double buggy waiting in their hallway, the two cots, it was useless now. All of it. He turned away from his wife then, from his child who he would never strap securely into the seat they had bought with the duck print to drive her home. She would never leave the hospital with them. Lucy’s emotion filled the room, her grief enormous. There was no place for his. His would come later when alone, he would shout and scream and shake his fist at the sky.

A nurse helped them take handprints and footprints of Catherine, impossibly small and they would remain forever so.

Time stretched slowly but all too fast. Lucy, in between bouts of tears, crooned ‘Hush little baby’ to her daughter, but it was all a lie. She would never buy Catherine a mocking bird, a diamond ring or a looking glass, but she sang it over and over, voice cracking, as though if she stopped singing for one single second she would have to let her daughter go.

Nevertheless, eventually it was time to say goodbye.

Time for Lucy to meet Connor. Her first sighting of her son was forever imprinted on Aidan’s mind. It was bittersweet watching her emotions slide across her beautiful face. She’d aged today. Her skin grey and looser than it had been yesterday. The love she instantly felt for her son was marred with sorrow for the loss of his twin. Guilt that she hadn’t been there when his sister had slipped away.

‘If my body had just—’

‘Shh.’ Aidan shook his head. ‘You are not to blame.’

‘I save lives every day.’

‘And sometimes you lose them too.’

Lucy was both grateful to and hostile with the staff of the NICU. Her anxious eyes following their every movement. Reading Connor’s notes. Making them explain again and again how frequently they were checking him. Telling them what to look out for as though she was their supervision doctor and they her trainees.

The staff were kind. Patient. Genuinely saddened to have lost a baby.