‘You’re looking a bit better,’ Ann said. ‘You looked ever so pale and poorly this morning.’

‘I felt it,’ Katie said. ‘But your mom’s been looking after me so nicely. I feel better.’

‘He’s beautiful. Aren’t you?’ Ann smiled and cooed down at the little boy until Katie was laughing. ‘I feel quite jealous.’

‘Oh, I could tell you a few things to talk you out of that for a start!’ Katie said. ‘Ow, I mustn’t laugh! I’ve never been so sore in my life. It’s like going through the mincer!’

They both sat adoring the little boy for a while longer. Katie felt as if she had a glow around her. But there was a whole host of things she was worrying about.

‘Look, Ann – you’ve all been so good to me. But I can’t keep taking your bed . . .’

Ann held up a hand. ‘Don’t even mention it. Tonight, you’re sleeping there. You’ve got to recover properly. Some of the girls are bunking up with Mom and Dad, and the rest of us are downstairs, but we’ll manage. We’re a hardy lot, us Millers – we can sleep anywhere.’

Katie’s face grew very solemn as her fears spilled out. ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do, Ann. I can’t just stay here, imposing on all of you. I mean, I’d like to give your mom some money for a start.’ Ann was holding up her hand in protest. ‘But I can’t go back to St Paul’s Road – I know she won’t have me, not now. I’ve got nowhere on earth to go.’

As soon as she felt a bit better Katie insisted that she move downstairs and let the Miller girls, Ann, Hetty and Dora, have their bed back.

‘And the moment I can find somewhere to go, I’ll be out of your way,’ she promised Mrs Miller. She insisted on paying her rent, feeling guilty that she had Simon’s money, yet was living off the Millers.

‘One thing I should do is go and see Mrs Thomas,’ she told Ann. ‘She’s a friend of my mother’s, but in her way she’s been very good to me as well. She told me she wanted to see the babby when it was born. I’ll go and see her this afternoon.’

It felt very strange venturing out in the cold winter air after she had been inside for so long. She felt as if giving birth had taken her on a long, strange journey and she had come back to find everything looking slightly altered from how it was before she left. She knew she was the one who had changed. Even her coat was stretched out of shape now that her belly had gone down again. She walked to the tram stop, holding her little boy swaddled up and wrapped in a white woollen shawl and feeling painfully self-conscious – surely everyone she met could tell she wasn’t married, that she was a fallen woman! Their eyes seemed to bore through her. But every time she looked into that sleeping little face, she knew that nothing anyone said mattered more than the fact that she was with him and he with her, no matter how hard she had to struggle.