I pull the phone out of my pocket and pass it back to him. Sometimes it’s best to know you will be worn down, and to relent before you actually are.

At home he plays, for rationed minutes, Nintendo Wii Pokémon, using the name KrayKrayNinjaFace.

‘Just so long as you know we’re not stopping at any gyms on the way home,’ I tell him, but the phone’s already buzzing and jangling and I’ve probably lost him.

I can remember the names of about three Pokémon, despite how often Cedar tells me others, but I do know where the gyms are around town. Each one is a virtual battleground, invisible to the real world, that hovers tantalisingly on the app’s map until your GPS coordinates align with its. Then the fight – your Pokémon versus those waiting in the gym – can commence. It’s several solid minutes of combat before a step can be taken away from that spot. We have already passed one, at the mural across the highway as we turned out of the downtown loop.

‘So, was there a baby or not?’ Cedar says, app noises pinging away. ‘That’s what I don’t get. Chris at the Merc said there was a baby, and now there’s not.’

For a second I can’t breathe. The breath is out of me but no new air will go in. My vision closes in. There’s just the road ahead, then fog around it, blankness. I clench the wheel hard. Blood rushes into my hands. The breath comes.

‘There was a baby,’ I tell him. ‘And now there’s not.’

We had reached week twelve when we let him know. There was a ninety-nine per cent guarantee then, ninety-eight or ninety-nine, of a live baby. At twelve weeks, you make plans. You see a different future. We told him and three days later, when the miscarriage happened, we walked it back. No baby, no baby. But he knows that was wrong. We were days away from making it public. Wade and Colleen knew, maybe one or two others. More, if the news has reached the Merc.

‘How is that?’ he says. ‘I wanted the baby.’

‘Yep, we all did.’ My head is full of the medical terms, the steady OB-GYN and her facts, Lacy’s face. ‘It just didn’t hold on. Sometimes that happens.’

He will need more detail, and we have to find a way to give it to him. For Cedar too, this person now travels with us, a presence but also an absence, a birthdate scheduled but not eventuating, a series of guesses that will not end about what she or he might have been.

Even when I blink, my vision doesn’t clear. I rub my eyes with my sleeve.

‘I just mega-evolved a Mewtwo,’ he says, through a cascade of phone noises. ‘Into Mega Mewtwo X.’

‘Let’s make a gym stop,’ I tell him. ‘We don’t need to be home in the next minute or two.’