Perhaps I just didn’t trust things to keep on going well. I was suspicious of good fortune, and I didn’t expect happiness to last. Rightly, as it turned out.

The birth was very quick, much quicker than with Ava or Ellie. I went into labour at eight in the evening, after my waters broke – good timing, since it meant Ingrid was still awake when we phoned her to come over and mind the girls. Our son was born five hours later, and then Mark was sent home and it was just me and the baby on the postnatal ward. We both slept a little and then, to my great relief, we were discharged the next morning.

Even after such a short time in hospital, going home felt like an escape. There was the world again, all its goings-on moving past the car windows – the cafés, the parks, the shops, all full of stars and angels and fake snow because it was nearly Christmas.

That evening Mark gave me dinner and waited on me hand and foot. The girls were thrilled. Even Ava. Lit up with the gorgeousness of it, the delight of a new baby in the house. I sat by the Christmas tree in the rocking chair I’d bought because I thought it would be comfortable for nursing, and Ava said, ‘So did you decide what you’re going to call him yet?’

There had been a lot of contenders. Mark and I had been through the baby name book several times, and then we had bought another one and gone through that, too. I looked across at Mark, who was sitting on the sofa watching us as if we were a miracle he didn’t deserve.

‘Your call,’ he said.

‘He definitely seems like a Felix to me,’ I said, looking down at the bit of the baby’s face I could see, which was squashed against my breast. ‘It means happy, doesn’t it? He seems like a jolly little chap.’

‘How can you tell?’ Ava asked, not entirely sceptically.

‘Oh… just a feeling. I don’t mean he’s never going to cry. We already know he’s got a pretty good pair of lungs on him.’

After I’d fed him the girls carefully held him in turn, and then I put him down in the cot and had a deep, uninterrupted sleep in the king-sized bed next to him. I had the bed to myself, as Mark had retreated to the sofa to give us all the best chance of a rest. And that was the peaceful end of Felix’s first day.

But in the bright light of the following morning, he didn’t look right.

His skin was tinged yellow. Jaundice. We took him back into hospital. I wasn’t particularly worried; Ava’d had jaundice, too, as a newborn, and it had passed within a day or so. The staff weren’t all that worried either, until a paediatric consultant saw the results of Felix’s blood test. She said there was a marker that suggested he had an infection, and he wouldn’t be able to go home again until they’d figured out why.