As they approached Aviemore the light vanished, leaving them in stormy darkness. The windows were blasted with sleet that sounded from inside the carriage like gravel hitting the glass. Holly finally took the shades from her head, placed them on the table. The train stood at the station for a couple of minutes and Eva watched a group of people on the other side of the platform, hats pulled low, collars pulled high, laughing together. And then their train pulled away and the landscape changed again. As suddenly as it had arrived, they passed the worst of the storm and a new light emerged, a thunderous gold that split the sky above the Moray Firth.

It was the last of the light. It hadn’t occurred to her they’d be travelling the last part of their journey in the dark. But they would. They needed to take the Far North Line from Inverness. They were not here to see the city of the Highlands; they were here to see the peninsula of jagged rock that Eva had visited as a child on what she’d once thought was a holiday with her mother. But it must have been something else.

And there, in her peripheral vision, was Holly Bhattacharyya. She was more than the first woman to use the baby pouch, of course, that was just fluke really, an accident of timing. What had made her famous – a hero, really – was the way she’d made everything seem so natural. She was calm. She was nurturing. Strong and determined too – she must have been, to go through with it – but she was petite and pretty and non-threatening and in all the photos she was surrounded by her beautiful family. Despite the pouch and the remaking of society that had followed, there was something very traditional about Holly and her life. Something content.

Even now, as Holly sat straight-backed with her hands clasped in her lap, there was something maternal about her that Eva knew was absent in herself. Eva was not offering comfort to anyone. That had never been her way. Here she was, next to Piotr, and she knew that they had loved each other once, that they were now as fractured as two people could be and she felt a wave of failure sweep over her. Was it possible that she was wrong? That she was angry, and frustrated, and tired, and lonely, because she’d been fighting for the wrong thing?