Patrick was waiting, trying to comfort the screaming twins by poking his pinkie fingers in their mouths.

“You scared me for a minute there,” he said, his voice only decipherable over the din because of its low register.

She couldn’t think with the crying—the interference caused her mind to fill with white noise. She made an effort to form a sentence, her language processors struggling uphill in the wind against her reptilian brain.

“You were just afraid I’d leave you alone with these two.”

He looked at her. His eyes were glazed in a film of tears. “Well, yeah,” he said, “that too,” and he kissed her.

Immediately a midwife started to arrange pillows, propping her up so she could feed the babies.

“You should feed as much as you can now,” she said. “It helps your uterus to contract.”

Feed as much as you can, she thought. As opposed to the meagre efforts I’ve been making so far.

As the midwife stuffed a tender nipple into the mouth of one twin and then the other, Patrick turned away. He shuffled around looking for change for the vending machine and headed off to get them both a cup of tea. By the time he came back and sat down, the midwife had left. He picked up a magazine but didn’t open it. His hands were shaking.

“It’s six o’clock,” he said.

“Right,” said Lauren.

“I should go, before I get kicked out.”

“I’m sure they wouldn’t mind if you stayed for a while.”

“OK.” He breathed in loudly through his nose. She waited for what he would say next. “But I’ve got to get to the shops, and everything.”

She wanted him to take her home and look after her. He’d done that once, early on. Only the second time Lauren had gone to his flat. In the night she’d started having terrible stomach pain, food poisoning most probably, from a bad takeaway. The next day he’d boldly insisted she stay with him until she was better. She didn’t want to stay—it was early days and they were still being polite, seeking to impress each other. Neither had yet heard the other fart. For a week she vomited near-constantly and her bowels had never moved faster. If this doesn’t put him off, she’d thought, and it hadn’t. He set up a bed for himself on the couch and tended to her every need. He did it all without complaint, and yet even then there’d been signs that he wasn’t a natural caregiver. She heard him, unable to prevent himself from gagging on the smell when he entered the bathroom after her, twice or three times that week. Also, he cooked with a certain undisguised reluctance (always did, she would discover), huffing when required to alter anything at all during the process. It didn’t really matter then because she ate almost nothing that week anyway. And it meant she loved him all the more, for doing what he did, making such an effort to override his natural inclinations. It proved without question that he loved her.