Beside him is the large jute bag he’d carried the picnic in. ‘I have something for you.’ He pulls out a familiar box. My baby’s memory box. ‘I’ve been adding to it, since you left. It’s all been for you, but it helped me, too, to do it. I’ll understand if you don’t want it, but I brought it along just in case.’

‘Can I look?’

He passes the box over and I settle it on my lap. Slowly, I lift the lid.

The teddy bear is still there, but there are other things too. At the top is a birth certificate. I take it out. Charlotte Alexandra Mary.

‘You were right about Charlotte.’ He clears his throat.

There is a pale green envelope. I pick that up next.

‘I wish I’d known about that before you ran away,’ he says. ‘One of the nurses took it. I wasn’t in the room, when you were with her. You didn’t want me anywhere near you. The hospital got in touch a couple months after you were gone, to see if I wanted it.’

I start to lift the flap.

‘Wait, Holly – shall I tell you what it is, first, so you can decide? You might need to prepare yourself. I’ve been in counselling – she told me to make you aware—’

‘No. Thank you.’

I slip my fingers into the envelope and pull out a photograph. I bite my bottom lip as I look at it. The photograph does not bring the memory back, but it proves it happened. They weren’t lying to me.

I am in that tight white hospital bed, propped with pillows and clearly not able to sit up unaided. I am almost as white as the sheets. My hair is long, and tangled, and mixes with hers, which is the same shade of amber, but for the white forelock. She is wrapped in Milly’s blanket and propped on pillows, because I am visibly too weak to hold a baby even as light as she was, and the tubes are snaking out of my hands and into the bags of fluid attached to the metal sticks above me. My head is bent, to study her. My eyes are filled with tears. I am bathing her face with them. She is so beautiful, but her lids are closed. Her lids were always closed. If she’d inherited Zac’s dual-coloured eye, would it have showed so early? Whatever colours her eyes were, she took that secret with her. My heart swells with love and grief, so big I can feel them pressing against the inside of my chest.

I blink hard, as Alice climbs onto my lap. She smells of baby shampoo.

Zac moves her shoe away from my unwieldy boot. ‘Careful of Holly’s foot, Alice.’