He giggled and splashed in the bath, playing with his toys. Afterwards, he lay on the changing table, his flesh all naked and warm, pink and chubby. Kicking his legs and laughing, he pulled his little fat foot towards his gummy mouth, making his high-pitched gurgling sounds. She was laughing and tickling him with one hand, the other reaching for the cotton wool and the baby lotion. It was just there, over by the sink.

Afterwards, she held him close against her chest, rocking him in her arms, saying, ‘Shush, there. Shush,’ even though he wasn’t crying. She kept checking him over, looking for bumps, evidence of bruising, but there was nothing.

He took his bottle and she put him to bed. Twice in the night, she went in to check on him.

She was still asleep on the fold-out couch in the sitting room when Yvonne and Jim got back. Blinking awake, she sat up, embarrassed.

‘Morning, Sleeping Beauty,’ Jim said, smirking at her bed-head, her sleepy confusion.

For just a moment, she forgot all about the previous evening.

But then Yvonne laughed too and said, ‘Where’s Cian? Don’t tell me he’s still sleeping.’

‘I wish I was,’ Jim remarked, a bleary hung-over look about him, and Yvonne slapped him playfully and said she’d go upstairs to rouse the baby.

‘How was the wedding?’ Leah asked Jim.

She cannot recall his answer. That part of it has become lost to her. All she remembers is folding the duvet over the couch and listening.

That was when, upstairs, the screaming began.

The strip lighting of the fluorescent bulbs in the hospital ceiling burns against her eyes. She opens them a fraction, a hand squeezing her shoulder, bringing her back to the present. The nurse’s voice, warm with comfort: ‘You can come in and see him now, love.’

Anton, heavily sedated, his stomach pumped, his lungs sucked dry, lies narrow and still in the bed.

It’s just the two of them in the room, but Leah feels awkward, as if she’s being watched by an unseen third party. She approaches the bed cautiously. After a moment, she reaches out to touch Anton’s hand. ‘I’m heading off, Anton,’ she says. ‘You’re safe now.’

Anton doesn’t react. No flutter of eyelids, no inclination of his head to indicate he’s heard. He looks so vulnerable, so alone in that big room.

As she listens to the bleep of the monitor, sees the tag encircling his slender wrist, she remembers the note he sent her earlier that week, words scribbled, the slanting cursive communicating an urgency she felt as she read it.

Haven’t you ever done something that you profoundly regret? Aren’t you ever tortured by the thought that if you had only done something differently, everything would have turned out right? Do you know what it’s like to live with such guilt?