Even though her belly has become a small mound, there is no baby inside. A molar pregnancy, is the term he gives it. A rare complication, characterized by the abnormal growth of placental tissue. There might, in the early days of her pregnancy, have been a tiny foetus, but if there was, it had been overwhelmed, pushed out, strangled by this abnormal growth – this mole – with its voracious appetite, swelling to fill her womb with its fluid-filled cysts.

A mole. At first, Leah cannot help but think of the small tunnelling creature of The Wind in the Willows – all velvety fur and gentleness. But now, in her mind, that creature grows sharp teeth and becomes vicious, a slavering fearsome thing, its tiny eyes flashing with malicious intent.

Jake runs a bath for her. ‘Will I bring you a cup of tea?’ he asks.

But she says no. His concern – his lovingness – helps, but one part of her simply wants to be left alone. She sinks down into the water, stares at her sunken belly, creases in the skin. It takes a certain amount of courage to do this – as if she has to steel herself to confront her own body. She thinks again of the operating theatre where, yesterday, the procedure took place.

‘Just relax there,’ the anaesthetist had told her, in his calming voice, and soon she was under in a dreamless sleep.

When she woke, it was with the impression that her eyes had been closed for just an instant – a minute or two. She had the unsettling thought that it hadn’t happened yet – that she’d woken up too soon. But then she felt the pad that had been placed between her legs – the wad of it like some awful evidence of the trauma to her insides.

In the ward, Jake had sat by her bed, grey-faced and anxious. He stroked her arm, offered her sympathetic looks, while she lay there waiting. On the opposite side of the room, two women in beds were talking across the space between their cubicles.

‘Is this your first miss?’ one asked, and the other said: ‘Yeah. I’ve a little fella at home already, though.’

‘Ah, that’s nice.’

Leah turned over on her side, away from them. Closing her eyes, she felt Jake’s kiss pressed to her forehead.

Now, in the bath, there is an ache inside her, like a long, deep pull. She imagines gloved hands delving inside her, surgical tools scraping her out. Blood clots escape into the water. Shaking, she pulls the plug, hauls herself out.

How long will it take? she wonders. How long until this heaviness inside her breaks, like still heat broken by a storm? She hasn’t cried yet – not really. A few frightened tears before the surgery, but the shock has a hold on her. She has the feeling that sorrow – grief – has not come upon her yet.