I said to both of them, ‘We’re coming home. We’ll be back soon.’ What I meant was, Hold on. Be there for me, and I’ll be there for you. Then I said goodbye and ended the call, and Mark looked at me and said, ‘We have to go.’

‘I know. It’s just… I feel bad about leaving him here all on his own.’

He put his arms around me. ‘I know.’

Before we left, I used the hospital breast pump one of the nurses had found me to empty myself out. I asked the nurse if she would be able to give the milk to another mother who needed it, who couldn’t feed her baby. I knew the hospital had a milk bank, and it seemed so wrong for it to go to waste. But she said regretfully that she couldn’t take it. There were procedures, and tests to be done, and the milk bank was reliant on mothers who could commit to donating over a period of time.

At the end of the day, what I could produce wasn’t enough. I tipped what was in the bottle down the sink.

We went out to the car with the bag and drove home. All the way, I was conscious of the empty car seat in the back. I supposed that sometime later that evening I would go to bed next to the cot Mark had so carefully assembled, which Felix would never sleep in again.

Ingrid was dressed in day clothes, but the girls were in their night things. They were all as pale as ghosts. I hugged the girls, and that was a comfort: they were so warm, so effortlessly alive, and both so big it was hard to believe I’d ever carried either of them inside me.

Then I tried to embrace Ingrid. I put my arms around her, but even though she let me I could sense her resistance to being touched. She seemed dry and rigid as an old bone.

She said to Mark, ‘Perhaps in time you’ll have another,’ and he just looked at her and I never heard her say that again.

Mark drove Ingrid back to her flat; she wanted to sleep in her own bed, she said. The girls turned in, and I got into my pyjamas and, on impulse, took one of Felix’s little babygros out of the bag and got under the covers and curled up with it in my arms. It still smelled very faintly of him.

But then I heard a small, semi-suppressed, unhappy sound. Someone crying. Ellie, in her room.

I got up, leaving the babygro on the pillow, and went in to her and held her till she was quiet. Then she withdrew and said, ‘I knew something bad was going to happen. What’s the point of knowing if you can’t stop it?’

‘You couldn’t have known, Ellie,’ I said. ‘Nobody could have done.’

She shook her head. ‘I did know, but I didn’t know enough. I don’t want to know anything any more.’