I let Zac take me back to his house the next day, numb and dumb as a piece of wood except for when he touched my hand to help me out of the car and I screamed. But in the end, I decided it was better there than Peggy’s. Peggy would want to drag me back to life. Zac wouldn’t dare to try. He was relieved I had gone with him, and grateful. He kept saying so again and again. He was timid-seeming, perhaps even frightened, though I was certain the old Zac was still in there, ready to strike at any time. I would never let myself forget that.

The nursery was empty. The Moses basket was gone. I was ambushed by a pang for him, picturing him carrying it from the house, imagining him driving away from the hospital with her empty car seat, which he’d set up in the Range Rover that arrived the day after he returned from Canada. But he did not deserve my compassion.

He had removed the white-painted cot, and the mobile with brightly coloured birds that I’d attached to it. There were empty spaces where the changing table and rocking chair had been. The Mermaid of Zennor curtains I sewed for her, started before I was certain we would have to flee, were no longer hanging in the windows.

I’d lovingly furnished that room, even though I’d known that my baby and I would never occupy it. That proved true, but not in the way I’d imagined. The room was empty. The room was like me.

My nipples tingled and leaked. My body was mocking me. It wanted to remind me again and again of how I’d failed, of what I lacked. My stitches itched and pulled.

Going up the stairs was like climbing a mountain. I had to sit down halfway up. My breath came in gasps, as if I had been running for hours. My forehead was beaded with sweat from the pain in my lower abdomen, my back was soaked.

Morning, noon, and night, Zac fed me a kaleidoscope of pills to wake me up and keep me calm and put me to bed. He let Milly and Peggy come and sit with me. He even brought them cups of tea. He actually seemed to want them there. I needed them, so he needed them too.

They said little. They held my hand. They put their arms around me as if they wished the pain could go out of me and into them, as if they wanted to share it. When I winced, they winced too. I saw Zac watching, as if longingly, because they could touch me but he could not.