Mark was still standing in the corridor exactly where I’d left him. There was nowhere to sit, and no one else around.

He looked frozen, not from cold but from time, as if ages had gone by while he was standing there and had transformed him, the way old wood turns eventually into something like stone. But for me the time had passed as if it was an instant: being with Felix, having to say goodbye. I had no idea at all how long I had actually been gone.

We made our way to the waiting room where we would stay until the operation was over. We got lost once or twice; the hospital was beginning to seem like a maze that we would never get out of.

The waiting room was bright and new, with a coffee machine and a vending machine that sold ready meals, and a microwave. There was a tired-looking woman sitting there by herself, eating warmed-up curry out of a plastic container. I assumed she must have a sick child too; she looked like she’d spent more time hanging round in waiting rooms lately than we had. She was giving off a definite vibe of not wanting to talk, so Mark and I sat quietly together and let her be.

It seemed strange to think of eating. Irrelevant. As if it was an old custom that should have fallen out of favour. I supposed I’d be hungry again eventually, but it was hard to imagine it.

Mark went off to the maternity wing to get the things I’d left up there – I’d assumed we would be going back, and hadn’t realised that Felix would be transferred to a post-surgical ward for children. There wasn’t much to collect: the bag Mark had brought for me when he’d visited, and a few bits and pieces that I’d left scattered around the room – a pack of nappies, wipes, and the little newborn babygros, yellow and white and blue, that I’d been rinsing out in the basin by hand. We hadn’t bought many clothes that size, because he was bound to grow so quickly.

Back home I had drawers full of things for him to wear when he was bigger. Nought to three months, three to six, six to nine. Soft leather shoes, the sort babies wear before they can walk. A couple of sleeping bags in different weights and sizes, a snowsuit that he wouldn’t fit into until next winter but that I’d spotted in the sale and hadn’t been able to resist. Tucked in a corner, next to the snowsuit, was the Christmas stocking I’d got ready for him, filled with little gifts already wrapped in paper decorated with snowmen and sleighs. Rattles. Chewy toys. A cuddly monkey with a cute face. And there was his present, a mobile for his cot with stars and clouds and birds.

The woman who’d been eating curry got up and went out. I was completely alone, for the first time in what felt like a very long time. I sat and leafed through a magazine and tried not to think. The celebrities with their stories seemed to belong to a previous era, as if the magazine was an ancient artefact that I’d discovered.