‘Well,’ she said, looking back up at the journalist, ‘that should give you a nice sense of closure for the article. Full circle, wouldn’t you say? Mr …’

‘Filipek.’

He gave a smile that seemed to Holly to be hiding something as his pen scratched away in his notebook. The pages were angled away from her, so that she couldn’t read what he wrote. Hardly in the spirit of the times. She reached up to her head and touched her fringe, making sure there was still a bounce in her hair. She’d had it cut very short, all over, a few years ago – there does come a point when it simply seems like a waste of time to be styling your hair every morning – but she’d kept her thick, bouncy fringe, which covered her forehead in one gentle inward-facing grey curl to sit just above her eyebrows. She liked to pat it.

It still seemed miraculous to her, even after all these years, that humanity had found a way to share the creation of life. When she was young it had seemed impossible, as if the inequality so blatantly visible all around was an innate part of what we are, as a species.

She could remember one day in particular. It was a late afternoon in September, right at the end of the school holidays. She’d been sitting out with her parents, their deckchairs arranged on the slabs of cracked concrete that served as a patio behind their home in the council estate. A trickle of autumn sun from overhead and similar houses in every direction. It was a small space – there was just enough room for them to sit between her mum’s potted fuchsias and planters of herbs – but then it was the small things that Holly was angry about, that day. Simple things that should have been so easy to change. Like the way her mum made every single meal and her dad sat upright – pressed shirt and tie, as always, clean-shaven like a matter of pride – and never offered to help. How ridiculous. There he sat, assuming his meals would be cooked for him. And there was her mum, quietly fulfilling his assumptions.