Sometimes it was so quiet she had to lean close to hear it; tiny light breaths. He was just a few inches away from her, lying on his back in the Moses basket they’d had with the other three. She would wake time and again in the night and lie with her eyes wide open but her breath held, straining to hear the feathery sounds. She would lean over and make out, in the dimness, the shape of his pale face, his mop of dark, cow-licked hair. Sometimes, as she watched, he would raise his hands like a conductor asking for silence before he began to summon music. She would hover above him, suspended in that frozen moment. His blistered lips puffed in and out.

How could it be, that she missed it, the moment when his breathing stopped and he lay in his own utter silence? For the first time in months, she and Adrian had made love, quiet and careful, and then Irene had turned over on her side, away from the basket and towards her husband, and had slept through the night, her hand against Adrian’s hip, her thighs sticky. She woke up feeling wonderfully refreshed, sun flooding through the curtains. Then she turned towards her silent son.

‘He died,’ she said to the lake.

Clenched fists that didn’t uncurl when she touched them; faint blue around his lips.

Six weeks old. Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. SIDS. Cot Death.

‘I don’t talk about it much.’

She didn’t talk about it at all, and gradually everyone around her had stopped talking as well; it was fenced off like a shaft that went down and down, you didn’t know where the bottom was. People thought it just got better after a while – he’d only been a few weeks old; she had three lovely daughters. But the silence he left was a roar inside her head.

‘I think it made me a bit mad for a while. I never used to be scared of things. Now I’m scared of almost everything.’

Leaning over her daughters’ beds night after night, standing outside their doors, gripping their hands so tightly when they crossed the road that they’d cry out in pain, phoning home each day to make sure their plane hadn’t fallen out of the sky or their skin hadn’t exploded in a sinister rash, waking up at night from dreams of them drowning, falling, bleeding, calling out her name …

‘And angry,’ she added.

Anger like a hurricane raging through her, a forest fire crackling through lines of great fragile trees. If she opened her mouth it would come gushing hotly out. Dragon’s breath: stand clear. She could scorch a person just from opening her mouth and screaming, screaming, screaming …

‘There you are,’ she said.

A calm elation filled her. She waited.

‘It’s a nice name, Felix. Unusual.’