When Lily wakes she enjoys a few delirious seconds during which she believes she is emerging from a terrible dream. But before she is fully roused the sharp smell of antiseptic penetrates her nostrils and she knows she cannot pretend that the events of last night did not happen.

Her eyes scour the room, searching for something familiar amidst the foreign bedsheets, melamine wardrobe, white china washbasin.

Light is inching around the edge of the curtains but she has no idea of the time or how long she has been there. It is only when she shivers that she realizes how cold she is. Her body is shaking and she cannot imagine ever being warm again. She lifts her arm to pull the sheets higher over her chest and notices the small plastic cannula piercing the skin in the crook of her right arm, the attached tube rising up into a bag of ruby-red fluid hanging from a tall metal stand.

Blood. Foreign blood is being fed into her body through a tube in her veins. She experiences a moment of vertigo even though she is lying down.

She turns her head sideways, away from the transfusion she does not remember being administered. In the back of her left hand is another cannula, another tube, another drip, this time to a bag of clear fluid she assumes is saline.

She closes her eyes, tries to stop the swell of nausea surging into her throat. She does not need to be told what has happened. As the image of a future without this longed-for second child pulls itself reluctantly into view, a torrent of grief rises into her chest, squeezing through the narrowing of her throat, finding its way out in deep, guttural sobs.

Daniel sits on a brown plastic chair by the side of the bed, holding her hand which is now free of its cannula, just a small red mark and infant bruise the only evidence that it was ever there.

It is, Daniel has told her, almost seven hours since she arrived at the hospital, time of which Lily has little recollection. She does not know whether she ought to be grateful for this lapse of memory or mourn it.

Daniel is talking and she is trying very hard to focus on what he is saying. But it is as though her brain will let only certain words through, so that their meaning must be slotted together like a jigsaw puzzle in which half the pieces are missing.

Miscarriage, hemorrhage, emergency D and C.

She lets him talk, wondering why her mouth is so dry, hoping that soon he will tell her the only two pieces of information she wants to know.

Blood loss, transfusion, lucky to be alive.

Finally she can wait no longer. Her voice, when it emerges, is quiet and small, as though it has shrunk in the hours of lost consciousness.

“Do they know what caused it?”

Their eyes catch before he looks down, studies the back of her hand, shakes his head. “No. There’ll have to be more tests. But given your history . . .” His voice trails off, leaving more questions than answers in its wake.