And sometimes, when she was there and Robin had had a four-hour stretch of uninterrupted sleep, it had felt if not like an adventure, at least not terrifying. Doable. Amid the anxiety – was Lennie getting enough milk? If she rolled in the night, would she suffocate? How was she, Robin, going to afford a child? – there were times when they’d start laughing at the sheer ridiculousness of their being in charge of a baby and not be able to stop. So many things: the way they’d had to take off their jeans to give Lennie a bath because the tub was cracked and leaked onto the floor; Psycho Mike-o from number 14 who’d asked Rin out three times a week; even the snails that came in under the back door overnight and left silvery trails over the grim nylon kitchen carpet. For a year and a half, that flat off Uxbridge Road had been their world, their tatty, semi-subterranean bunker of a world, and now no one else knew about it.

Except Josh, because he’d been there, too, more weekends than not. Though his dad was training him up to run their family business back in the Midlands, most Friday nights he’d arrived on the doorstep in Shepherd’s Bush with a curry – ‘Not the Balti Triangle but it’ll do’ – and stayed ’til Sunday. He’d watched Euro 2004 on their scratchy green sofa, giving Lennie a bottle, and when they’d all gone out together, he’d taken her in the baby carrier, her cheek pressed sideways against his chest, little feet bumping the tops of his thighs. He’d only been twenty-four but if anyone ever thought Lennie was his, he’d never jumped to deny her like some of her other mates had, the ones who’d treated Robin as if she was suddenly a different, mildly contagious person, The Girl Who Got Knocked Up.

The slam of a car door. Lifting her head from her hands, she saw a tall black woman in a three-quarter-length coat on the pavement outside. A second later, as the woman checked her phone, a shiny blue-black head emerged from the driver’s door on the far side. Robin froze.

Riveted, she watched as the man rounded the back of the car. The hair was right, he was Indian or Pakistani, but then he looked up and – oh, thank fuck – she saw that the face underneath it was wrong: too young, too fine-boned, too light. And as he stepped onto the pavement, she saw that he was too short – two or three inches too short, under six feet. She leaned backwards into the cover of the dining-room curtains, heart thudding.

Energetic footsteps on the path, then the four Big Ben notes of the doorbell. Her mother appeared in the archway, eyelids swollen. ‘They’re here, love. Shall I let them in?’