‘It’s called dissociative amnesia. There are a range of symptoms, but in your case, you’ve suppressed your memory of a specific traumatic event.’ He wiped a hand over his head so hard his scalp blanched.

‘You’re constantly telling me there’s something wrong with my mental health when what I’m saying isn’t to your liking. If she were really dead, holding her would have been the most precious thing in my whole life. I would want to remember. I’d never let myself forget a single second with her.’

I got up to leave the room. When I reached the kitchen door and turned to look back at him, his elbows were on the table and his head was in his hands and his whole body was shaking, but he wasn’t making a sound.

I spent as much time as I could in the garden, lying on the grass beneath the handkerchief tree, which was in flower. Above me, the white petals fluttered like doves. Below me, the skeletons in the plague pit reached out their arms, and I pressed myself into the earth to be closer to them, wanting to be swallowed too. I imagined my hair, twining into the grass, tangling with the roots below, pinning me down and pulling me in, until I was more soil than person and I couldn’t see or be seen.

I only ate if Zac put a plate in front of me. I only drank if he poured water into a glass and put it in my hand, his fingers careful not to brush mine. I cried all the time. I never seemed not to be crying. The blood seemed not to stop. All I wanted was for it to stop. Every drop reminded me. I thought it would never stop.

Zac murmured that he loved me, that he would always love me, that I would come back to him in time, that he would look after me, that he would change, he was changing and getting help, that he would do whatever it took to earn my forgiveness, that we would have another baby, there were ways, surrogacy, and Milly had told him she would do that for me, and we could still use my eggs. This was a new and different Zac. This was not the Zac I knew. But my heart was hard, forever hard, to him.

‘I don’t want another baby,’ I said. ‘I want my baby.’ My arms were so empty.

‘You are too young, and too hurt, to know what you want,’ he said.