She had never even held a baby before then. She had not expected to be quite so entranced by this tiny warm being that her body had miraculously known how to assemble. It had taken her by surprise just how miniature and perfect he was. The softness of his skin, the whorl of dark hair on his head and the way his wet pink mouth opened and closed like a fish. His shoulders had been so little! His tummy rounded like a peach. She had marvelled at his ears, so delicately curled.

Two days they’d had together, a bubble of time when the outside world had receded, when she held her baby and fed him and gazed at him. Her dad came to visit her, and Danny too, plus her aunt, but that was it. Nobody else seemed to exist. Then the brisk, matronly woman from social services had arrived with her clipboard and forms and plucked him away – ‘Come on then, little one,’ she had said kindly enough – and Olivia started to wonder if she was making a terrible mistake in letting him go.

‘Wait,’ she said, already missing the warm weight of him in her arms. It no longer seemed to matter that she was only nineteen and that she’d had to drop out of university for this. ‘I think I’ve changed my mind.’

But the woman was presumably used to bewildered post-partum mothers calling these things when they too noticed the sudden emptiness in their arms, and she reminded Olivia of the new family that had been approved for the baby, how they lived in a lovely house with a big garden, how they’d already decorated a nursery for him and picked out his name – Leon. They were grown-ups with plenty of money and could give him, in other words, all the things that single, teenage, penniless Olivia couldn’t.

And so she’d squashed down her feelings and let him go. Off to his new family and painted nursery and big garden, off to his life of plenty, without her. Because let’s face it, she’d only muck things up anyway, she’d only let him down somewhere along the line, just like her own mother had in fact. Was it her imagination or had the baby yelled something out as the woman departed with him? A cry of protest, she’d thought – Take me back to my mother! – although maybe it had been an angry one, directed at her: How could you do this to me?