Emily flinched, tugging the belt around her waist tighter.

‘Why us?’ she said. ‘Your colleague could have picked anyone walking into that waiting room. Why did it have to be us?’ The words trailed into a silence. ‘I know what you think of me,’ she said again. ‘You despise me, I imagine. But you don’t know what it is like.’

Emily had turned away from Casey, was looking across the green stretches of the park.

‘No. I don’t know what it’s like.’ Casey waited. ‘But I do want to understand. If you’ll be a source on this story, I promise the Post will protect you. We’d anonymise your story, keep your secrets.’

That everyday trade: protection for knowledge, knowledge for power. Sources close to, good friends of.

‘This wasn’t even our first try at surrogacy, you know.’ There was a defiance in Emily’s narrow shoulders. ‘After all the Clomid, and the rounds and rounds of IVF, we found a surrogate in England. It took years to find her. Not many people will . . . We had all the agreements written up, everything signed and done. We paid the surrogate as much as we could under the rules, which isn’t very much in England. Just expenses. But still. I couldn’t believe that it was happening. At last. At last. I was so excited. I dreamed about this baby every night. She was in my dreams. She was in my head. I knew her.’

Emily stopped talking. She gazed across the pond, to the chestnut trees in the distance. The sky was cold pastels.

‘She lived in Yorkshire, and we would drive up and down for the scans and everything. I got to know her really quite well. I’d go up for some of the midwife appointments. I heard the heartbeat.’

Casey imagined Emily picking out baby clothes, appraising the candy-coloured prams.

‘We got the call late one night,’ said Emily. ‘The surrogate – Naomi, her name is – had gone into labour. Dominic and I, we drove through the night. We were so excited. Thrilled. Grinning, like a couple of idiots. And we got there, to the hospital, just after the baby was born.’

The wind caught the chestnut trees, sending branches rustling like secrets.

‘And then Naomi decided that she didn’t want us to see the baby.’ Emily spoke as if she were reciting a story. ‘Not that night, she said. We tried to stay calm. We went to a hotel. The Premier Inn, just down the road. It’s funny, what you remember. Plastic carpets, and a bored teenager on reception, and windows you couldn’t open even a crack. We lay on the bed all night, the two of us. Eyes wide open, face to face, promising each other again and again that it would be all right. That Naomi would feel differently in the morning. That there was hope.’

Emily rubbed her face for a second.