Dave Vance was a carpenter by trade and he loved wood. His trade didn’t pay much, not nearly enough to give his wife Josephine the lifestyle he knew she ought to be enjoying. And she was brighter than him – a teacher. He had always felt in his heart that she deserved better than he could provide. They’d been married five years and it was a great sadness to her – mainly to her but of course to both of them – that she had so far been unable to conceive. It broke her heart. She cried when her period came every month. A child would have made their happiness complete, rounded them off just nice.

But that was all by the by. For now, he was working with his hands, making a living. Barely. He adored wood in all its textures, the hardwoods, the soft ones you could carve like butter. But he hated fucking wooden doors. They jammed or rattled, depending on the time of year and the humidity. This one, which the good Sisters of Mercy had hired him to attend to, was currently jamming, so he had been planing the convent’s front door for an hour now, skimming off a tiny bit here, a little bit there, until he thought he had it just right.

‘It’ll be loose in the summer if I do this,’ he’d warned the Sisters as they’d fluttered around, plying him with coffee and cake.

‘No matter,’ one smiley-faced Sister had told him. ‘It’s the jamming of the door that’s the nuisance. We like the door to open freely, to let everyone in. People come to us, they don’t want their way obstructed.’

From inside the hall, he opened the door, closed it. Perfect, right? He smiled in satisfaction. He opened it again . . . then stopped dead.

There was a baby wrapped in a pink blanket out there on the doorstep. He stood stunned for a moment. Couldn’t believe what he was seeing. The baby was gazing up at him with sleepy blue eyes. He looked left and right. Jesus, someone had left the kid here for the Sisters to find. A baby. A real little treasure, and someone had just left the . . . it must be a girl, the blanket was pink . . . they’d just left the little girl here, abandoned.

Josephine would so love a little girl.

The thought jumped into his mind. Could he do it, just pick her up and take her?

Even before he was sure he could, even before he had time to reason it out, talk himself out of it, he was doing it. He gathered the child up and went down the steps, his heart thudding away in his chest like he was committing a crime, which maybe he was. He crossed to his old battered workhorse of a Ford van and tucked the baby inside on the passenger seat, closing the door gently.