It kept going through Helen’s mind, long after Sean had left the room (he didn’t like to stay in Frankie’s room for long, as though her pain and Frankie’s absence collided in there like two particularly noxious gases). She didn’t feel all that sorry for Patrick – not as sorry as she felt for herself, for Patrick’s baby had survived, but she conceded it must have been horrendous. As she roamed around Frankie’s little bedroom, trying to find things to do, she idly wondered if she would dare broach the subject with him. Patrick was a strange sort of guy, for a policeman, even though he was really good-looking. Hair a bit too long, glimpses of all sorts of tattooed tendrils creeping under his shirt collar. Not to mention a kind of hooded reticence in his face that suddenly seemed to make more sense to her.

She could hear Sean downstairs, tipping ice into a glass. Within an hour, she knew, he’d be drunk again. She was tempted to join him in oblivion.

She opened a red plastic drawer in a stack of three primary-coloured ones, like huge Lego bricks. A sheaf of Frankie’s paintings had been stuffed in there, the thick mix of poster paints rendering the cheap off-white paper almost corrugated. Sifting through the usual toddler daubings, she found a few of the ‘naps’ she had drawn on Frankie’s insistence, and caught her breath.

Frankie loved maps, which she referred to as ‘naps’. She’d gone through a big phase recently of demanding that everyone around her draw her special ‘naps’, and Helen loved her daughter’s world view this afforded. The ‘naps’ were a mixture of fantasy and reality, a collision of fact and fiction along dotted lines denoting imaginary borders.

The first one she pulled out took her straight back to the afternoon she’d drawn it for Frankie, a few weeks ago, as she sat astride on one of her legs, leaning forward on the table to keep her balance, her finger tracing the lines she drew and crowing with delight as Helen added each of Frankie’s suggested landmarks:

‘There, Mummy,’ pointing with a tiny forefinger, ‘that’s where the three little pigs live.’

Helen remembered drawing three pink faces with snouts, and carefully inscribing Little Pigs’ House, which was a few doors down from Frankie’s House. ‘And up here is really really actually Heaven.’ So she had written Really Really Actually Heaven, with an arrow pointing skywards, towards the clouds. It made her smile, but with a pain like a sharpened icicle simultaneously stabbing her gut. The other landmarks on their map included An Orchard, Ross’s Car and The Cold Place Where They Make Ice-Lollies.

She picked out another one, one she hadn’t seen before, in Alice’s rounded handwriting. NAP OF MY ROAD. The word had become part of their family’s lexicon.