She perched beside Pax on the step, voice low so that Kes couldn’t possibly hear. ‘He told me he died.’

‘That’s right: Oliver, the baby we lost.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ Ronnie reached out for her hand, but it was snatched away.

‘It was a long time ago.’ Pax chewed at her thumbnail, staring hard at the wood of the newel. ‘Now Kes has decided Oliver’s his imaginary friend, it’s hard to avoid the subject.’ She stood up, moving away from the stairs to the gloom of the passageway. ‘He’d be nearly ten now.’

‘Oliver was stillborn?’

The pause stretched, vrooming noises above, the tick of Lester’s old wall clock marking the silence. Wait, Ronnie told herself. Wait. She’ll say it. Pain comes out.

‘The cord had got stuck around his neck, they said. I had no idea until it was too late.’ A light switch by the kitchen door was under close scrutiny, her hypnotic voice covering emotion. ‘I was three days overdue and when my midwife came to talk about inducing labour, she couldn’t find a heartbeat. They rushed me in for a caesarean, but he was already dead. He was the perfect little person when I held him: his fingers, his ears, hair like mine.’

They both stared at the light switch. Wait, Ronnie, wait.

‘They let you have a funeral when a baby’s stillborn, but not a christening. We’d chosen his names way back when the scan showed he was a boy – Oliver because we both liked it; Alexander from the Forsyth side, Jocelyn from ours.’

‘I can’t imagine how devastating it must have been.’

‘We were offered grief counselling, but Mack said it would only keep dredging pain up. He wanted to try for another baby straight away, blot out what had happened, but it didn’t work like that. I blamed myself, still do. How could I have not known my baby was being strangled inside me? When I told Mack that’s how I felt, he didn’t deny it. He thought it was my fault too.’

‘That’s so wrong!’

Pax headed into the dark kitchen, crossing to the little Rayburn, leaning against the range for warmth, prayer hands to her nose. ‘It took five years to conceive Kes, eight rounds of IVF.’ Her fingers thrummed together. ‘It almost finished us; perhaps it should have. It has now.’ She walked to the fridge, reached out for the handle, then changed her mind and walked back again.

She wants a drink, Ronnie realised, almost offering to find her one before remembering.

‘Kes was our Band Aid, five years too late.’ Pax was back at the Rayburn. ‘Mack was adamant about christening him Oliver, our second son given the same names as that little headstone, like a replicant. It’s not uncommon apparently, but I hated the idea. I should have fought it more. I was just too grateful that he was healthy, and too ashamed that it was taking me so long to love him when I’d held his lifeless namesake in my arms and just loved, you know, just loved. For a child so wanted, it took me forever to bond. I love him more than life now.’ She glanced up at the ceiling. ‘Even if I feel like I don’t deserve him a lot of the time.’