But it’s not Kyle’s face.

It’s Dan’s.

What the hell is that about? I tear off the page – that is not going in the portfolio.

Right now I could easily rest my head on the drawing board and fall asleep. If an easy day like this exhausts me, how would I manage with a baby?

When I sit down on the sofa, Bear follows straight away, jumping up and arranging himself so his head rests on the velvet cushion.

The Amazing Book of Us is on the coffee table shelf, where I left it on Monday. I’m not in the mood for reading, but I pick it up and let my fingers trace the cover image: a rough charcoal-and-pastel drawing of two parents, one child and a dog, all facing away. Of course we wanted a bigger family, but had agreed that showing more than one child felt like tempting fate.

Andrew worked on it for ages before showing it to me – ‘There’s a bloody good reason I haven’t drawn anything since primary school.’

It’s true that the kid seems taller than the adults, and the animal trotting next to our future family has the proportions of a hairy mammoth. But when I saw Bear at the rescue centre, he was Andrew’s drawing brought to life: the chaos of his tangled coat, the pent-up energy of his chunky limbs. I’d actually gone there to adopt Kardashian, a fluffy Persian cat I’d seen online. She needed a home, I needed another soul in my flat. Mission accomplished.

Except that on the walk back to the office to finish the paperwork I saw one of the kennel staff chasing a young dog across the rainy pebbles and it was love at first sight. The rescue staff warned me he’d already been returned by two families, that he wasn’t suitable for an inexperienced owner, that he’d been nicknamed Teddy Bear the Terrible and the Border Terrorist.

I did talk them into letting me adopt him – and for the first three months after he came to me, I wished I hadn’t. He destroyed four skirting boards, nipped my feet with sharp teeth and picked fights with dogs twenty times his size. Everyone told me I should send him back, but I refused. I believed that, despite his ‘difficult’ past, he had the capacity to love. It’d just take time for him to trust me.

And now I wouldn’t be without him.

If I can cope alone with an adolescent Bear, I am pretty sure I can cope with a baby.

I hug the book to me: it always gives me what I need, the closest thing I have to Andrew being at my side. We sprayed his drawing with fixative, to protect it from tiny fingers and thumbs we hoped might handle it hundreds of times.

So far, I’m the only reader. And if I want that to change, I have to keep going.