Holly had been testing him, he realised suddenly. She was never going to ask him to wear the pouch – they would never let a journalist wear their pouch, not a family like that. She’d wanted to see his reaction. He didn’t know why.

He stood up. His jacket clung to his trousers, damp from the wet wood he’d been sitting on, but he didn’t notice. He took a step away from the bench, looking carefully around the park. Trying to remember how to look at things properly. The trees, the fence, the farmyard animals they kept in the corner. The huge, bright billboards along the tops of the buildings across the road, advertising films and department stores and shampoo. It wasn’t the advert for FullLife and their health-care plans that caught his eye, though. Not exactly. It was what had been done to it.

First the bikes and now this.

What was going on? Something had changed these past few months and, whatever it was, it was getting worse. There was more petty crime. There were more conspiracy theorists online. Last month he’d pitched an article about the used pouches, the new social divide, and now this … This was blatant vandalism. He hadn’t seen anything like it in years.

As he stared up at the poster he wasn’t sure if what he was feeling was unease or an illicit thrill. The words written in friendly green letters advertising the FullBirth ‘baby pouch’ plan had been spray-painted over. Someone had climbed up there to graffiti over the advertising, to block out the word ‘Full’. And in its place they had scrawled something else, something that he thought was a signature, like a tag. But then it jumped out at him. It wasn’t a tag, it was a word. There, in an ugly black scrawl, someone had defaced the ten-foot-tall FullLife advert.

Not with art. Not with colour or imagery but a word.

Still.

The word was ‘Still’.

And the poster said: Still Birth.

Chapter 4

IT WAS THE day of his first grandchild’s birth, and Karl was balancing on the top rung of a ladder putting the final touches on the elaborate sea mural he’d painted for baby Will’s new bedroom. Of course, he understood that Will, Kaz, and Rosie, would be living at Holly’s place once he was born, same as they were now. And that was totally fine. He just wanted them to know they’d always be welcome here. Here, there would be purple mer-people and bright yellow butterfly fish on the walls. Here there were glowing stars on the ceiling. OK, so secretly he wanted this to be Will’s favourite bedroom. That wasn’t so bad, was it?