She was trying to work out what it was that she felt. She was not sentimental, and there had been no satisfaction in her job for years. You couldn’t keep doing something if there was no demand for it to be done – and you can’t help people that don’t want to be helped, either. Her grant had been cancelled eighteen months ago, and she’d hardly been surprised when the last of her private funding was withdrawn. This month, for the first time in her life, she couldn’t even afford the rent on her office. She had asked for more time. They had asked her to leave. It was over.

Guilt, was that it, for letting her mother down? For failing to preserve what she had been asked to protect?

We are women, her mother would say. Life grows inside us, and we protect it. Now, more than ever, we must protect it.

Perhaps she had failed twice over, then. Though she didn’t stop what she was doing – red pepper and sugar snap peas were quickly chopped and thrown into the pan, with noodles and dark soy sauce. Her mother didn’t know what it was like to receive the letters she’d been getting, for years now. Polite, kind, well-meaning letters telling her that she was wrong. That the pouch was beautiful. That it had changed the world for the better. That everyone was equal now we had moved beyond natural birth. That they could help her. That they wanted to help her. The pouchers had no doubts any more; they were happy. The women – and the men. They were happy.

Yes, closing down was the right decision. She couldn’t have taken the futility any longer. She needed to have purpose, needed to feel like she was getting somewhere. An image flickered in her mind, not of where she was going but of where she’d come from. Perhaps she should visit the home where she’d lived for the first three years of her life – so far from where she was now, but only a bus ride away. She shook her head. Going backwards wasn’t the answer. It was something new that she needed. Something totally different. She would take a week. Rest, and think, and make a plan. She piled her stir-fry into a bowl and threw in some extra chilli.

Sitting at the table with the fading light outside, the sound of leaves rustling in her front garden and the gentle voices coming from the radio, Eva tried to enjoy the crunch of a sugar snap pea. She allowed herself to close her eyes again. She allowed herself to imagine how things might have been. And she listened.

She listened to a voice on the radio, so soporific she leaned forwards over her bowl, resting her head in her hands.

Then, she heard the words.

Natural birth.