Christine pulled her closer. ‘We don’t know yet, sweetheart. He’s very, very poorly.’

They sat up for half an hour or so then began the slow process of rotating four people through one bathroom. Robin went last, in no rush: she knew she wouldn’t sleep for a while. Lennie climbed the ladder to her bunk without a word, said nothing when Robin said goodnight.

She lay alone in the dark, duvet pushed back, window open, sweating.

The day she’d brought Lennie home from the hospital, it had been Corinna who picked them up. She’d arrived at Charing Cross carrying the detachable part of the car seat like an Easter basket. Robin had been terrified of hurting Lennie’s tiny neck so after she’d put her little socks on – less frightening but still scary – it was Rin who’d lifted her into the moulded plastic shell with its grey velvet lining, strapped her in. She’d had to carry her, too, as Robin, white with pain, did the C-section shuffle through the corridors to the lifts. She’d felt deranged, bent in half, staring wide-eyed at normal people, who seemed to have withdrawn from her behind an invisible but impenetrable wall. Her pregnancy bump had deflated quickly – stress, probably, said the midwife, ripe with judgement – and her maternity dress hung off her like a shroud.

It was freezing, a blue-skied knife of a December day, the frost still on the ground at lunchtime. Corinna had salted the stone steps down from the street. On their front door, she’d stuck two tinsel sparklers and a banner with big gold letters, CONGRATULATIONS. When she unlocked the door, Robin smelled beef stew and burst into tears of pathetic gratitude.

The emergency C-section had been all her own fault: by racing to finish as much of her dissertation as she could before Lennie arrived, she’d given herself stroke-level high blood pressure, bringing Len’s arrival forward two weeks. ‘So that backfired,’ Rin had said, dry, from the vinyl chair at her bedside on the ward. They’d started laughing, Robin clutching her abdomen, trying to hold her stitches together, begging her to stop.

Love you, you know.

And I love you. I wish I’d told you. I wish I’d said it at the time.

Do you think I didn’t know, you emotional retard? Get a grip!

Robin grinned as tears slid sideways into her hair. What would Corinna do? If the roles were reversed and she was dead, Corinna the one lying here in a freaking bunk bed while Lennie lay dying in hospital, what would she do?

As if she even needed to ask.

Chapter Nineteen