The things that I learned, and did, and had done to me, were a blur. It was so hard to put them in the right order. I knew that I’d lost time, but I wasn’t sure how much. Peggy acted as my translator, mediating between me and the world of the living, which no longer made any sense to me.

Two weeks. That was how long I’d been in the hospital, Peggy told me, coming every day and trying to help me count. They would not let me leave, because of secondary complications. An infection that I needed intravenous antibiotics for. Severe anaemia due to blood loss – evidenced by lab reports and by the bruises in varying shades of red and blue and purple and yellow and green that covered my body.

Peggy asked me if I wanted them to do a post-mortem.

‘Why? We still can’t be sure she is dead.’ As I said this, I thought of a tombstone in the graveyard where my parents were buried. The birth and death dates on it were the same. Born sleeping. I had a habit of pausing over it.

‘Oh, Holly.’ Peggy looked so stricken.

So I said that I did not want them to cut her open, and it was pointless, since we knew why it happened, since she was perfect except for the fact that she had a mother who failed her. This made Peggy cry and say I was wrong, but I knew I was not. And then I said, But am I a mother, Peggy? And she said yes, you are, nothing can change that, and she cried some more.

There was talk about cremation, the hospital arranging it to make things easier, and promising it could be done individually instead of with other babies, and I said yes to that, because I couldn’t manage it myself, and the less I had to discuss with Zac, the better. Peggy told me we would get the baby’s ashes back, and we could bury them or scatter them or even make them into jewellery that I could wear every day.

‘I do not want any of those things, Peggy,’ I said. ‘I want my baby to be alive.’

She told me Father Bill could do a funeral, if I would like him to, and the church was raising money for a cuddle cot in my baby’s honour, and Zac would agree to anything I wanted and refuse whatever I didn’t.

Zac filled in forms, Peggy put them in front of me, and I signed without taking in a single word.

The nurses asked me what my baby’s name was. I remembered that Zac wanted to call her Alexandra Mary, after his grandmother, and I wanted to call her Charlotte, after Charlotte Brontë. I tried to say that her name was Charlotte, but the words would not come out.