There were plenty of times when, despite how happy I was, how honestly happy I was, I would start to think about the past. But I could always stop myself, because the important thing was that she was here.

Dave and I had spent ten years together already, looking at each other – across kitchen and restaurant table. Staring and blinking and watching and glancing in bed, meeting rooms, waiting rooms and at parties. De-coding the hidden messages in each other’s eyes. We knew every wrinkle, line and tic in each other: the single eyelash that ran counter to the rest. How the face contorted with laughter and tears.

The right time, then, to greet something new, a new version of ourselves with her barely there hair and tense red fists wrapped in a cellular blanket – cellular, like the mathematics paper marked with its complicated workings and rubbings out.

And there were other times, more than I care to remember, when Mia writhed and bobbed and made her warning siren sounds with a rounded mouth. And I worried. Like any mother would. I would pull her away from a feed, the sweat that had once sealed us now escaping, tickling and itching, all the while thinking: She is in pain. Something is hurting her.

‘She needs a new nappy, that’s all,’ Dave would say. ‘You’re just worried about things going wrong.’ That smile again.

Didn’t he know that after ten years together you can tell a genuine smile from a fake smile?

Why didn’t he say what he meant? Don’t spoil this for us, Cath.

On the early evening of the twenty-fifth day I drew the curtains against the setting sun and answered a phone call.

‘Is this the mother of Baby Freeland?’

Her mother. Hers.

Yes, I belonged to her.

‘Mia Freeland is her name now.’

I wanted her tone to change, to lilt into a floral exclamation of how lovely a name, but she was hesitant. She told me that her name was Kirsty and she was a health visitor, based at our local GP practice in Terrence Avenue.

‘There were some results from the blood test, the heel-prick test,’ she said.

I got hold of a flap of skin on the edge of my thumbnail and sucked through my teeth as it tore. Test. My four-letter word. Dave and I had failed so many tests already, each time more stinging than the last. But Mia was here now. Our final pass.

‘Are you still there?’ said Kirsty.