After the session the manager catches me. She wants to make a film of me reading to Cara. She’s never seen a baby that likes books so much. I laugh uneasily.

‘Think about it,’ she says.

*

I stop taking her to the groups so regularly. I tell people she’s had a cold. I tell them we’re going to the park more often now that the weather’s better.

‘I hope she’ll be walking by summer,’ I say. ‘I can’t wait.’

And I get people to give me tips about trikes and trousers and surfaces to try her on. I go to the more active groups, leave the quieter ones alone. But a week or two later I lift Cara onto the top of a slide and she says, ‘One, two, three – go!’ quietly, but I look around and there’s the new woman, watching me.

‘Go!’ I say, and push Cara down the slide.

I look up again and she’s still looking. She holds my gaze for a moment and then slowly turns away.

At lunch that day, Cara counts out her beans onto her highchair, one to twenty.

‘If I eat one, it will be nineteen,’ she says.

‘That’s right,’ I say.

‘If I eat two, it will be eighteen.’

I don’t reply.

‘Mummy? It will be eighteen.’

‘Eat your beans,’ I say.

After lunch she wants me to read to her. I say no – no more books now, I’m tired. While I load the dishwasher she crawls to the pile and pulls one out, then sits on the floor and studies it, turning the pages delicately. She furrows her brow. I take it from her, gently, and switch on the TV.

*

I’d heard of this before, on the internet. Archived chats. Coded suggestions. Always accompanied by post deletions. And then posters who just stop posting. It doesn’t end well.

I start to overbuy, little by little, in my grocery order – small, cheap things that won’t be noticed by the software; things that are easy to pack and that don’t require cooking. Flat tins of sardines are the best, but I have to be careful – too many will raise a flag, so I get one extra every week – just enough to look like the baby’s eating more and likes tinned fish, I reckon. I vary the other items – one week hot dogs, another baked beans. In this way I collect twelve tins within six weeks.

We eat a bit less, and save what else we can. We run through everything in the store cupboard – anything we can’t take – and eat that instead. Pasta, rice, noodles, dried pulses, instead of valuable tins and vacuum packs.