What if the baby looks like Scott? The thought of it makes her sick.

Bill returns thirty minutes later, carrying a suitcase. He doesn’t announce his departure. He just goes.

‘Is he going?’ Janette asks Becky. ‘Is he actually going?’

Janette chases after him, calling him a selfish prick all the way down the street.

When her mother returns to the kitchen, Becky is bent over and throwing up all over the kitchen floor. Janette goes to her quickly and scoops handfuls of her daughter’s hair back up and around her neck. ‘There, there,’ she says. ‘There, there.’

Adam comes round and they sit on her bed watching eighties comedy movies, eating popcorn. They don’t talk much. What is there to say now? They are waiting out their lie together.

Word has got out at school. Mary gets in touch to say: Adam??!

Becky doesn’t reply.

‘Have you seen Scott?’ she asks Adam.

‘No,’ he says. ‘I’m not even sure he knows.’

Here comes life. This screaming, wriggling, red-faced hungry thing. Becky feeds her, only because it seems cruel not to. The milk is there. Her breasts hurt. The baby latches on. The tightness of the connection surprises her. The baby’s other hand rests on her breast.

She looks nothing like Scott.

None of them are meant to come, not Janette or Adam’s parents, but they come anyway. And what can she do? Turn them away?

On the face of it, Adam looks like a little boy himself. All that steel going. He wants to protect her and he doesn’t know how.

Janette holds the child and its tiny red fingers clamp round her little finger. ‘I can’t believe your dad’s missing this,’ she says, blunt to anything but the truth of what she feels.

Adam’s mother changes the baby’s nappy, with quick expert movements.

‘You haven’t forgotten anything, have you?’ says Adam’s dad.

‘You don’t,’ she replies, stooping to kiss the baby’s belly. ‘Are you going to hold her?’ she asks Adam.

And the moment Becky sees Adam kissing the child’s head, holding her in his arms, she knows without doubt that something catastrophic has happened.

They have all fallen in love, and so fast.

It will fall to her to cut these ties. To break one, two, three, four hearts, not including her own. To hand this baby over to someone else, someone who will smell unfamiliar. Who can offer her a bottle where she had a breast. Will the child remember?

‘Do you give her a name or do the other people do it?’ Adam’s mother is doing her best not to cry as she asks it.

‘Maisie,’ says Becky. The name comes unbidden. From out of nowhere, like the child herself.

‘It means pearl,’ says Adam. ‘From the Greek.’