She looked up and saw a young man, mid-twenties maybe, carrying a pouch. He shouldn’t be here, she thought. It’s not safe, in this crowd, anything could …

‘Please,’ he said again. ‘Is our baby at risk?’

Suddenly her eyes were stinging.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I don’t know. I’m sorry …’

And then she was beyond the crowd, the winter chill fresh on her face. She could breathe again. If she was quick – though she didn’t want to run, that might make them want to follow – and if she stayed calm then she could get over the road. What were those other voices? Not the shouts, not the questions. She stopped, suddenly recognising what she could hear. There was singing. She turned round. By the front of the building people had been placing flowers. Someone had hand-painted a sign that read ‘Will Bhattacharyya’. There were teddy bears and roses and bouquets piled up outside the birthing centre and people were sitting in a circle on the ground, candles flickering beside them. Singing.

The crowd weren’t following her. Some of them were watching, or talking among themselves, a few describing what had happened into the phone cameras held out in front of them. It was windy; she was suddenly aware of the cold, of her hair blowing into her eyes. A van with a TV crew pulled up alongside the building, but the director didn’t want to speak to them. She had no idea what she could possibly say.

Instead, she walked towards the group of people sitting by the flowers. To her surprise, a couple of them moved over to give her space.

‘Thank you,’ she said.

The building was providing some shelter – the candles flickered but remained alight.

She sat down on the ground, and joined their circle.

Eva tiptoed to the back door in her socked feet, pulling her coat from the stand in the hallway and picking up her ankle boots from the busy row of mats on the floor. The rest of the house was still sleeping but she’d been up as soon as the sky lightened. Careful not to wake Piotr on the sofa by the fire, she’d peeked out of the curtains and seen the world in the crisp white of an undisturbed night of snowfall.