Flora looked at him. His handsome face was so tired; he’d lost too much weight. He was still in the throes of such a strong grief.

It made her vow to appreciate her own situation more. Especially when she remembered how much she’d worried about Douglas before he’d arrived. And after. She had been told by the other mums she met around the place that this wasn’t uncommon at all. People who desperately wanted to be parents, who had fantasies about how perfect it was all going to be, had a very difficult time of it, when their baby wouldn’t sleep or eat, or wasn’t the perfect heavenly dream they’d expected or read about in magazines or looked at in advertisements. And new mums didn’t lose their baby weight by “running about after the baby” like celebrities said they did. Was it just possible, she’d heard one mother muse, that those celebrities might in fact be talking out of the cracks of their arses?

Flora had by no means lost her baby weight but was filing it very far down on her list of “Current Things to Worry About.” He wouldn’t mention it in a million years, not being an idiot, but Joel thought it suited her; it made her so pretty and rounded and soft.

With Joel, there had been some worry. But as with some reluctant parents in cases of accidental pregnancies, or those who had slightly (or in Joel’s case, extremely) ambivalent fathers, the force of the extraordinary rush of love that babies brought with them could knock them over, take them completely by surprise, and Joel was the worst of the lot.

From the second Dougie had arrived, Joel had behaved like a man poleaxed by love. Flora complained he had never once appeared so gaga about her, but she didn’t really mind, she supposed. He had been so worried about whether he would take to parenthood—he had been a foster child, moved around from house to house, never once finding a home—that he had been mute and difficult and anxious all the way up to the birth itself (an unusually speedy process that Flora found increasingly difficult to remember anything about), but as soon as the squawking gawky, tiny, blood-, shit-, and goo-covered alien—or, counterpoint, the most beautiful miracle ever in the history of human existence—was placed on Flora’s stomach by the midwife, Joel had been hit by a lightning bolt.

And any ups and downs Flora felt after the birth—and there were absolutely loads of them, notably how it feels to become a mother when your own mother is no longer around to share it with you—were somehow balanced out by Joel’s extraordinary, all-encompassing love for the baby and for her; and finally, her doubts about whether he was, with his difficult past, capable of loving at all were set aside. She knew she was lucky. She didn’t even know where the resentment came from. So she ignored it, hoping it would go away. She was so lucky.