When at last he was allowed to hold them, he looked down at their tiny faces and felt nothing but pure love. One resting each side, they were small enough that their entire bodies ran down his forearms. They smelt of milk, and the hand sanitiser he had to coat himself with. They moved slightly in their tight swaddles.

‘They’re beautiful,’ he said to Georgia, his voice husky with barely contained tears. And, by god, he meant it.

He watched them grow. They were his family. His parents dead, they were his only family – Georgia, Liam and the twins. Georgia and Liam had at first tolerated his presence and then, when they learnt he could be trusted, they were grateful, letting him babysit. Two babies are a handful, and none more than these two. Insanely inquisitive, they’d stick their fingers up his nose, grab hold of his ears, cackle when he blew raspberries on their tiny chubby stomachs. Then, when they were bigger, he’d take them to the park. Herding cats, running around after a football, their little podgy legs pounding furiously across the grass. Georgia would sometimes join them, watching from afar, laughing, then racing across for reassuring kisses when one of them inevitably fell over.

Converting this room, his spare room, was Georgia’s idea.

‘What else are you using it for?’ she said. ‘Then they can come and stay with you.’ She looked at him with a knowing smile. ‘We’re going to need all the help we can get when the baby comes.’

And she held out the scan photo. A tiny black and white blurry image, and he knew what it was.

‘Only one this time,’ she said as he hugged her. ‘Thank goodness.’

She was six months pregnant when she died.

He feels the pain throb in his stomach. A feeling he’s done so well to block out, putting their photos in this box, never looking at them, never thinking about them. But what good has that done him? They come back, in his dreams, and he wakes, his face wet with the tears he doesn’t allow himself to cry during the daytime. He blocks out that emotion, but with it, he ignores any other feeling. Of happiness, of joy, of love. For the fear that he’ll experience it again.

Because these kids, these perfect, beautiful boys, gave him a small, sneaking look into a future he hadn’t considered. The idea that he could be a father. That one day he would meet someone and have kids of his own. And that, actually, this was something he wanted, that he’d be good at.

He doesn’t think that now.

He picks up another photo from the box. This time, one of him and Liam. He didn’t just lose a sister and his nephews that day. He lost a brother, too.