The baby has woken and is crying now, and your husband is changing her nappy and attempting to soothe her too, shushing and singing and turning the mobile above her changing mat, but the pitch of her cry is rising and all she wants is you. This burden, this privilege. You take her into your bed and she latches on and feeds in desperation before finally lolling, open-mouthed, asleep. You ease her onto your chest, the way you held her as a newborn, so she could hear the sound of your heart. Already she’s getting too big for this. You can feel the outwards rise of her ribcage with each breath, as it presses against yours. You think you’ll never forget the particular weight of them, and then you do, and another’s newborn is terrifyingly flimsy and insubstantial, as if, though you try not even to think it, they haven’t yet committed to the world. The way you and your husband, on your first trip as a new family into town, could barely contain your giggles at the sight of two toddlers in buggies in a lift, such swollen and overgrown babies, alongside your perfectly sized firstborn in his bassinet.

You go to text your husband the memory but you’ve left your phone, you realise, in the car, in the cavity in the door on the passenger side. You almost go to text him to tell him that you’ve left it there and can he—

Instead, you close your eyes and listen to him in the room next door, singing to your son, the songs your son 143loves, dragons and flowers and grandfather clocks; all, ultimately, about loss, which is maybe why you sing them: to inoculate, to prepare, for the time you won’t be there and he’ll know nothing of how much you loved him, the quotidian task and blessing of it. Do you remember the owl?

The dales seem a lifetime away. Just this morning, clambering up to see the ponds brimming with winter rain, the blank trees around them not yet even imagining their leaves. Your son, after a brave attempt to keep up with his cousins, wanting to be carried. Come back next summer, they’d said, and we can have picnics on the ridge. For a moment you see your son, brown-legged and golden-haired, scrambling ahead, racing joyfully away from you. Maybe the baby too would be walking by then.