It had been coming for a while. That afternoon on the concrete was the last of a long series of arguments, and non-arguments: of those barely noticeable details – injustices was too grand a word – that add up over years to form who a person is and how they see the world. But she remembered the day not for the words she’d used but for the recognition that it would be the last time she tried. She gave up hoping to get through to them. It wasn’t the beginning of their argument. It was the end. That day she dismissed their views, as they had dismissed hers.

She’d always believed she could make things different in her own life, though. She’d kept searching for a way – and this was where it had led. The problem wasn’t simply a society sculpted around the needs of men, forcing women into the roles of wife and mother. It was deeper than that. No matter how well they argued, or how hard they worked, women would always be the primary caregivers while they were the ones having the children. They would always have to take more time off work while it was their bodies that needed to recuperate; that were expected to breastfeed. She couldn’t deny it: men and women were different in one way. Not in their minds, or their taste in toys, and certainly not in their abilities – but in their physiology. If equality was to be achieved, the physiology, the biology, had to evolve.

And what a difference it had made! Society at last expecting – no, assuming – that fathers played an equal role to mothers. Businesses offered full parental support, flexible hours, actual understanding. Having a baby wasn’t something you had to work around any more; it wasn’t a difficulty that forced compromise. The rest of life was organised to fit naturally around raising a child.

Not that this journalist was going to get to hear anything about her long-gone anger. None of them had. From that first article onwards, she had been calm and assured. That was who she was able to become, thanks to the FullLife baby pouch. And thanks to another woman, an extraordinary woman who, unlike Holly, had never appeared in a newspaper.

‘Do you have children?’ she asked, and the journalist looked up at her in surprise. Perhaps she wasn’t supposed to be asking questions. His eyes were grey, like his suit, and his case, and his phone, but his hair was a thick, rich brown that curled around his face, giving a hint of someone young, playful. She liked him a little more for it.

‘No, I …’