Irene picked a framed photograph out of the box near the door and held it. It had been taken a few days after his birth, when he was asleep. His eyelids were slightly swollen; his face smooth. He had a button nose and a small mouth already with a milk blister on the upper lip. She had called him tadpole, poppet, pigeon, honey-bun, muffin, my dearest sweetest love. There was a faint red stork mark between his eyes. She held the photograph against her chest and stared around. A boy called happiness.

‘Clem can sleep here,’ she said aloud, noticing how her voice bounced round the empty room. ‘I’ve decided I don’t want to move again, after all.’

It was small and run-down, in an unlovely street, and a poor, neglected neighbourhood, another world from the airy detached properties her friends lived in, but suddenly she felt fond of the house, protective of its shabby honesty. It was in the heart of the city, among the throng of ordinary, unprivileged lives, and it held so many of her stories. It told her who she was. Like her skin protecting her outrageous heart, it hemmed her in and held her safe.

She went downstairs and put the photo among all the others. Her family, the one she’d been given.

At the twenty-four-hour supermarket, she filled a trolley with familiar things – chicken drumsticks and pork sausages, hot chocolate and miniature marshmallows to go with it, caramel ice cream, green apples, unwaxed lemons, porridge oats, pudding rice, lime cordial, milk chocolate digestive biscuits, raspberry jelly, tea bags, baking potatoes, fish fingers, Marmite. She let herself imagine spooning food onto the girls’ plates, their faces turned towards her, and felt a stab of fear. They weren’t all hers any more. They belonged to another world as well, and would be looking at her with the judging eyes of people who had left. She would feel self-conscious with them, and would worry about what they thought of her.

She sat at the kitchen table, as she’d done in her dream the evening before, and drank a cup of mint tea. She rang Karen, who was surprised two weeks had gone by already; they arranged to meet once the girls returned. They would go to the zoo together, or maybe the aquarium; giant rays and mean-eyed sharks would glide past the faces that they squashed against the glass.

Irene said nothing to her about Luke. She would tell no one and he would be her secret, like a walled garden only she knew about. There were good secrets and bad, she thought; the ones that slowly poison and the ones that give solace. This secret was good; it had blue skies and a healing sun, and in its enclosed space she could recover the self she had thought she had lost.