He got up. His lips felt dry, broken. His hands were shaking. The world was darker, but his longing intensified. He wanted to make it stop.

He stumbled to the door, still clasping onto the yellow handrail, and leaned his head against the glass pane as the train pulled into the station.

The door opened.

But he could not step out onto the platform.

Time had collapsed. He could see in the faces of two utterly different women, both of whom he loved, simultaneous disappointment in him. He could see their pity and feel their blame. And he could remember the extraordinary closeness of carrying the pouch, just as clearly as he could remember the horror of holding a baby’s lifeless hand in the lab. In that instant the pouch was warm and soft and intimate and life-changing and made up of cold inhuman substrates neatly sliced apart in autopsy. It was possible, he thought, to love two people at once. It was possible to feel wonder and horror in equal measure.

Could he be wrong? About the third generation? There was that case, after a stillbirth, when the second baby was healthy …

Could it be something else?

No. He wouldn’t cling on to false hope any more.

He didn’t know what to do next.

Maybe he should get off the train. Then he could jump.

But as the doors closed he edged backwards, into the carriage, and as the train began to move he sat back down, in the same seat he had been in before. He closed his eyes, and the train continued to travel the Circle Line. It could, after all, keep going around like that forever.

Holly still couldn’t, wouldn’t, believe it. Freida would not have run away if the pouch was causing some kind of inherited infertility. If everyone born via the pouch would inevitably miscarry their children … No. Not the Freida she knew. They had to be leaping to the wrong conclusion. What did Eva know, after all? What did James Quentin know? Not as much as Freida. There had to be something else going on. There had to be a way to fix the problem. The pouch had changed everything; it had made society better. For the first time in history, women had true equality.

Beyond York the fields stretched flat and far to the horizon. To one side greens and browns, dull yellows edged with low hedges, to the other, lavender. Holly reached to the top pocket of her coat and pulled out her large, tortoiseshell-rimmed sunglasses. She placed them, carefully, on her face, making sure to free the strands of hair that were caught behind her ears and touching the bounce of her grey fringe. She wished Will was with her. Will would have understood. He would have worn a trench coat.