Beth gets up every day at six to walk the dog before work. Christmas barks at cars, people, trees and lampposts. She doesn’t like the colour red, in fact she hates it, and she refuses to walk anywhere near a drain. But Beth loves Christmas as much as her broken heart will allow. She looks at her and sees herself, so takes the nips and sleepless nights when Christmas howls at the moon. Beth even joined her once, throwing back her head and baying along.

On the early walks, Beth would wait patiently for Christmas to come back, which she always did in the end, if you didn’t rush her. Maybe if Beth hadn’t been rushed to have another baby so soon he might have lived. Maybe he wouldn’t. These are the things Beth accepts as she waits for Christmas to limp back to her.

She tells Lenny about the dog when they talk on the phone and Lenny laughs when he sees the picture she texts him and replies, OMG, Mum! The text feels like the time she pulled off her little toenail, after stubbing it on the stairs. Fast, sharp pain, then relief. Greg wouldn’t speak to her at all at first, just answered and passed the phone to Lenny, then hung up when she was done.

After a month, though, he asks her how she’s getting on. He says it so quietly, she almost hangs up, thinking he’s speaking to Lenny, but then he says her name. ‘Beth?’

‘I’m okay,’ she stutters, ‘I’ve been going to counselling. And taking the antidepressants. Almost a fifth of the population are on them. The number of prescriptions has doubled in the last ten years. Even children as young as six have been given them.’ She pauses. ‘It can happen to anyone.’

‘I know, Beth,’ Greg says quietly. He could have said he’d tried telling her that once but she didn’t listen: she’d screamed at him instead.

After a month without seeing her son, Beth has started to live Greg’s life. The agony of being childless but still a parent. Love like a river, like a sea, and nowhere to send it. A tsunami of pain.

Beth and Christmas don’t walk far to start with. They are both weary, weathered by storms, as they shuffle round the park and the local pond, where she and Lenny once floated paper boats and collected frog spawn. The first couple of times they go, she wonders if she might spot them, Greg and Lenny, flying a kite or wading in the shallows, but by some unspoken agreement, Greg has stayed away from their old haunts. He lets Beth rediscover them and, in turn, herself.

Autumn falls on them slowly, and before Beth knows it, Christmas is diving into heaped piles of rust-coloured leaves while Beth laughs at her. Takes a photo to show Lenny.