We were a normal family for exactly twenty-five days.

On the second day we brought her home from the hospital in a car seat. We put it down on the black-and-white weave of the living room rug and Dave said, ‘I feel like I can breathe again.’ Because for most of the pregnancy it was like we had held our breaths.

‘Dave, come on. She’s almost asleep.’ My smile was fading but his was wide and bright like a row of circus bulbs and part of me thought, let him just enjoy it.

‘BABY!’

His volume made me flinch. ‘Dave, please stop.’

‘What? Come on! Mia is here!’

Mia. Found on page 89 of The Great Big Book of Baby Names and circled like a bingo number. He kissed me on the forehead and I smiled for him. I kissed Mia and there we were, connected in a Russian doll of kisses. What a lovely family, someone looking on might have said.

‘It’s all right,’ he whispered. ‘Nothing’s going to get us now.’

And I believed him. I really think I did.

It was the kind of summer where everyone knew it was going to be a good one, right from the first days of the end of spring. The week she was born, the doorbell rang twice a day with deliveries of fresh-baked muffins, wrapped packages of soft toys, and cards printed with storks, peppered with sequins.

Mum, my sister Caroline, Dave’s mum. Our house seemed constantly full of people making the tea, padding in and out of the living room in their socks holding plates of cake, burbling their news. I would look up occasionally, to make a show of listening, but she was always there, cradled in my arms – a tiny person wrapped warm and safe in blankets, peacefully living out her first days in soft, new skin that shone like crushed diamonds.

I am lucky, I thought, in the mornings, as Mum emptied the dishwasher and waxed lyrical about the church pews being cleaned with an alternative furniture polish that had given Sarah-from-six-doors-down a terrible thigh rash.

I am so fortunate, I thought in the afternoons, as Dave and I walked – no, strolled – in the local park, gripping pram handle and coffee cup, like all the other parents.

A hood and a hat for the blinding sunlight.

Balled socks and folded babygros in neat stacks.

Floral fabric conditioner and frying onions lacing the air and warm, sweet milk everywhere. Bubbling away in me. Poured over the porridge that would feed me, so that I could make yet more milk to feed her. I never felt like an animal, not in the way of feeling hunted or preyed upon, but I also didn’t feel any more complicated than an animal. It was hard to explain exactly. Grazing and feeding her. Sun up, sun down.