Her beautiful baby is asleep, as is her kind husband. All easy sleepers, she is the family exception. She envies them for the ease with which they lie there, the dreamish escape they have inbuilt into their lives, the salve that their peaceful sleeps give them. Since Jacotte was born, she hasn’t had one good night’s rest, and it has driven her to lunacy. She is even afraid of her reflection in water now lest she see the black impressions sleeplessness has given to her eyes.

‘I am sorry,’ she proclaims.

They are not listening. They never listen, and so she can speak freely.

‘My nervousness has stopped kindness flowing. I only think of how to manage my being needed, rather than the need itself, but none of this would matter if I could provide, and I cannot. I am too weak. I apologise. I apologise for my failure.’

She gasps, and throws her hand over her mouth. Near the end of her speaking she overheard her own voice and realised she had not been speaking words, but instead formless groans. Half sentences and half words, indecipherable and without meaning, have been pouring out of her mouth in an unbroken stream, though that which she had intended to speak was perfect in her mind.

An ocean of sudden sweat, in one holistic sheet, bursts through her skin. She has never felt its like; even her toes are moist. She is damp, covered in a glowing sheen and her breathing is ragged. A summer rain came from within her, and left. The sweat turns cold; she is shuddering, and even her vision vibrates.

‘You will all love me,’ she says, but she is babbling again, saying nothing.

In a frenzy, she pulls her dress down again, and she is squeezing at her left breast with both of her hands, grunting with the effort. Her movements are violent. She screams in pain, but her struggle produces nothing. She lets go of her breast, and leans her head back, awaiting the shooting and raw pain that will soon overcome her breast before numbness eclipses it, and then, she sees a movement and feels a quick release. She glances down at herself. Out of her left nipple, gleaming and dark, leaks a single drop of blood.

The man leaves …