Even now, when she finds herself socializing with the Plants, with these glamorous beautiful vets, whom she would only have ever admired from afar, she allows herself a small smile. For them, and their normal parents, but also for her, and how far she’s come. She is not there any more, back in her childhood, in that house where her mother never opened the curtains, where her father smoked so much the entire room looked grey, and thank fucking God for that. She is here, about to have her own child, and to right some past wrongs.

But it isn’t quite the same. Paul is adorable, but he isn’t hers. She has nobody to anchor herself to.

She lies on the bed and checks her phone. She might have a nap. The heat out there is too much at lunch-time.

‘Lyds,’ Joe says. He looks at her, a familiar expression on his face. ‘We can’t solve everything, you know? It’s a kestrel-in-the-shower situation.’

Lydia feels a grin crack across her features. In the early days of Joe joining the practice, he began a pattern of behaviour that he has yet to break. Lydia still remembers that first time. It was only a few weeks after he’d started, his first set of nights. She’d woken in the morning, Joe sleeping next to her after getting in sometime after six. It had been a deep winter morning, the heating creaking, no light from outside. Lydia had stumbled into the bathroom, reaching for her towel in the half-light. All she remembers is turning on the bathroom light to find an injured kestrel sitting in the shower tray, staring at her in equal surprise. She’d screamed, and Joe had rushed in, and said, ‘Oh, yes, there’s a kestrel in there,’ and they’d doubled over in laughter. ‘He’s had better days,’ Joe had said, pointing to his leg. ‘I couldn’t leave him.’ Joe had turned and gestured then to a handwritten sign he’d attached to the door of the bathroom. Warning!!!!! it said. There is a kestrel in here! ‘Hardly an explanation,’ Lydia had said drily, and Joe had kneeled down to check the bird’s leg and said, ‘Don’t kick a kestrel while he’s down.’ Other animals had followed – most memorably, an owl sitting calmly on the arm of their sofa, which Lydia discovered when getting a glass of water – but a kestrel in the shower became marital shorthand for trying to take on too many problems at once.

‘I know,’ she says, flashing him a small smile. ‘We haven’t had one for a while.’

‘I’ll bring you home a real nice kestrel soon,’ Joe says easily, moving some clothes off one of the chairs.

Her phone makes a noise, the BBC Breaking News noise. ‘Wow – have you heard this?’ she says, showing him. Joe finally stops tidying and looks at her.

‘A major search is under way in the hills just outside Verona, Italy, as British national, William McGovern, thirty-one, is missing,’ Lydia reads.