‘Dr Greystone said surrogacy was becoming much trickier in India.’ Vivienne was sounding more confident now. ‘He said you didn’t quite know what was going to happen in India, that it would be much more straightforward in Nepal, and there was a woman ready to do it. Keen, even. It would be really helpful to her and her family. And we thought about it, and we knew we had to try. After that, we just got more and more excited. But just when we were counting down the days to start, Nepal changed the rules.’

‘Their supreme court banned it for everyone except Nepalis,’ said Casey thoughtfully.

It was the earthquake in 2015, oddly, that shone a searchlight on surrogacy in Nepal. To avoid the Indian ban on gay couples, some surrogates were being inseminated in India and then shipped back over the border to Nepal. When the earthquake struck the Himalayas, killing almost 9,000 people, foreign governments rushed to save the babies. One 747 landed in Ben-Gurion with twenty-six brand-new Israeli babies on board. Of course, there was no airlift for the surrogate mothers.

Nepal wasn’t the only workaround the Indian industry had identified either, Casey knew. By the time of the earthquake, women were being recruited in Kenya, and flown over to Mumbai to be inseminated. When they were 24 weeks pregnant, the women were flown back to Africa, to give birth in designated hospitals in Nairobi a few months later. The parents then picked up their children in Kenya. Three continents, working in an odd sort of unity.

‘Dr Greystone called us into his office one day,’ said Vivienne, gathering pieces of china in the palm of her hand. ‘He said that if we went ahead, he couldn’t be sure we would be allowed to bring the baby home from Nepal, after all. He warned us that it might turn into a complete nightmare. I just collapsed, right there in his office. I remember crying and crying. I said I just couldn’t go on. It had felt like we were so close, finally. But now it was all going to be taken away, just like that.’

The baby had stopped crying upstairs. The house was silent.

‘Then what happened?’ asked Miranda.

‘Dr Greystone called me a few days later,’ Vivienne said. ‘He knew who my father was, you see. It must have come up, in one of our chats. He was nice, Dr Greystone. And we had been seeing him for so long that he knew that my father had moved from Cairo to Dhaka. He had been very kind when my mother died. He knew that she was desperate to be a grandmother.’

Vivienne’s eyes filled with tears again. She looked much younger when she was crying.

‘What did Dr Greystone say when he called you?’ Casey edged Vivienne forwards.