Jake makes her meals, brings her little presents: books, magazines. They lie on the floor unread.

‘You should go back to work,’ she tells him, worried about all the time he’s taking off. He needs to work. They need his earnings.

‘I want to take care of you,’ he says.

‘I’m fine,’ she tells him, his arms around her, trying to feel safe in his embrace.

When he draws back, his eyes scour her face, as sharp as a physician looking for evidence of illness or disease. ‘You’re not fine,’ he says gravely.

Leah’s mother calls to see her. A tricky one, this. A test. If anyone can cause the emotion to break, it’s her mother – always able to reach the tender spot inside her, always able to coax her true feelings out. She sits on the side of Leah’s bed, fixes her with a stare that is a complex mix of love, anxiety and maternal warmth. It has some effect. Tears roll. Leah presses a Kleenex to her face.

‘You’ll have another baby, sweetheart,’ her mother says, holding her hand and squeezing it. ‘Just give yourself some time. Let your body heal. Be patient, darling. It will happen, and then all of this heartache will be forgotten.’

It is not enough.

Matthew stays away. At weekends, Jake takes his son to the park, the zoo, the cinema, but he doesn’t bring the boy back to their flat. It’s as if he’s anxious Matthew’s presence might upset her. Leah feels grateful for this sensitivity, but it worries her too. The weekends, without Jake, are lonely and long. She idles around the flat, half-heartedly rearranging their possessions, her mind elsewhere. When Jake comes home, she smells the outdoors on his skin. There is a thoughtful air about him on his return, as if his mind is still with the boy. With Jenna. A new and unwelcome thought comes to her: that he is reluctant to come home to her and her pent-up sorrow. That, in his heart, he wishes he were back in his old home with his wife and son. That he is secretly nursing feelings of nostalgia and regret.

‘She asked me to give you this,’ he tells Leah, handing her a small box.

She opens it and finds a tiny ceramic angel – a brooch pinned to a sheet of card. On the card is printed a poem. Leah reads the first line:

A butterfly lights beside us like a sunbeam, and for a brief moment …

She stops and puts it aside. A sudden burn of anger comes up her throat.

Carefully, she returns the brooch to its box, sets it down. ‘I wouldn’t have thought Jenna’d be into that sort of thing,’ she comments. She cannot keep the acidity from her voice.

Jake’s eyes flicker over her face. ‘She was just trying to be nice,’ he says.