The hour passes in an instant. I file out of the room with the other students, no longer an outsider. I know where the cafeteria is and walk there in a haze of energised happiness, past posters advertising upcoming band performances, a city record store, the new women’s journal, notices about student union services.

And then I see Skye. She walks towards me, a friend either side of her, wearing jean shorts and the same cheesecloth smock she had on when we left her, but washed now, no longer muddy, bloodied, a second skin over her swollen belly. She smiles at me. My knees buckle and I collapse onto the concrete.

When I come to, I am sitting on the footpath with my back against a wall. Looking up, I see the three girls crouched in front of me, with the sun above them, sharing a halo. They are asking if I’m okay in overlapping sentences, a harmony of concern. I nod slowly and, remembering why I fell, look at Skye. But it isn’t Skye. The smock is the same, her hair is blonde, but that’s where the similarity ends. How did I transform this younger girl, her star-sign pendant dangling from a silver chain in front of me, her hair like silk curtains, into Skye?

The three girls help me to stand up and guide me to the closest wooden bench. They offer water and to make a phone call for me, to walk with me to the health centre. One digs in her bag and finds mints. I tell them I’m fine, have low blood pressure, that I’d neglected to eat breakfast, that it’s nothing. And while they clearly want to help me, I resist every suggestion until they give up and leave.

I brush my hair with my fingers, straighten my shirt then sit still, staring numbly at the passers-by and cars. Why had I seen Skye here, now, eleven weeks and three days after the crash?

If she’d survived, her baby would be about seven weeks old now, able to lie on its stomach and lift its head, to smile, to reach and clutch. Skye would be tired, up throughout the night to comfort and feed. Would Dad have helped? I have no idea if he helped my mother when I was a newborn.

I sit on the bench and think. Were Skye and her baby alive, they would be changing daily. Their forward movement would affect everyone around them, in ways large and small. But we stopped her in her tracks. Skye will never lower her new baby into her cot, or watch her first wobbly steps, or teach her to read. Beau will never know this brother or sister. A girl, I somehow think. My father may never know love again. There must be a consequence for that. That is surely the essence of law, as well as physics: action then reaction. What should be my penance: should I stop being, too? But what good would another death do? A pigeon perched on the lip of a rubbish bin stares at me, waiting.