In the underground car park, you sit with the children asleep as your husband takes the bags up, turns on the heating, makes a hot-water bottle for your son’s bed underneath the draughty window. These offerings, these devotions, banal and endless, our days going round and rushing from under us; the measure of our love. 141

When your husband returns, he takes the baby-carrier and the final bag and you unbuckle and lift your son, the surprising weight of him, nudging his arms around your neck and his legs around your waist, and he murmurs and nuzzles at you. It seems impossible that here you are, a mother with children, a family of four. All the people you’ve been, or imagined being. All the people you’ve known, and loved, and love. There are times in your life you would have looked with bewilderment at this; at other times you would, with astonishment, have said, Yes, I’ll take that. Yes.

Through the car park, its low ceiling and flickering lights and smell of damp, and slowly up the stairs, four, five flights of them, pausing on each landing. Then into the flat, the ticking of the radiators and clanking of reluctant pipes, and sleepwalking your son to the toilet, holding his hips as he grumbles and aims. Unbuttoning his cardigan, wriggling the final wooden toggle through its too-tight buttonhole. The cardy was knitted by your mother, wool chosen and bought on the Lower Newtownards Road, buttons from the box of buttons you loved as a child, running your fingers through the cool slippery mass of them, selecting a single one and closing your hand around it tight. You think, now, that it’s a kind of spell, the knitting of a garment for a loved one; each stitch a ravelling-up to keep them safe. You fold and put the cardy on a chair, still heavy with the warmth of him, and hug him one last time then tuck him into bed. Is this my bed, Mummy? Shh, it is, yes. Good, let’s never, ever leave, promise me, Mummy, promise me we won’t? And 142what can you say to that but, Shh, I love you, it’s all ok, and everything will be ok, I love you, shh.