Rosie grinned and blew a kiss to the pouch Kaz was carrying. And once they were in the lift, being effortlessly transported to the twenty-fourth floor, she couldn’t help reaching out towards it. During the first few weeks they had both stroked the pouch relentlessly – it was so soft and warm and comforting, and knowing that their baby was in there, she just couldn’t stop. Kaz was the same. She’d find him in the middle of the night, sitting on the floor by the pouch stand’s legs with the incubator doors open, sometimes whispering to baby Will through the audio adapter, sometimes singing into it like a microphone. Kneeling up so he could lightly rest his head against the curve of the pouch hanging on the stand, just like he did sometimes when she was wearing it.

They’d got used to it of course, everyone did – the novelty of something so tactile was replaced by the life inside, by choosing names and clothes and imagining what he would be like, how quickly he would learn to walk, who he would be when he grew up. They’d imagined entire lives for him, her and Kaz, lying in bed and talking for hours about their baby.

‘I think he’s going to play the cello,’ Kaz had said one night.

‘Why the cello?’

‘I don’t know … I’ve always liked it, I guess.’

‘Me too,’ she said. Rosie couldn’t play any musical instruments – she’d always kind of wished she’d been patient enough to learn when she was younger, but she was in too much of a rush to do other things, to play games and do colouring-in and create cards for everyone she met with bits of fabric stuck on, sequins and tiny beads that they still, occasionally, found underneath their furniture. ‘You’ll teach him to read music?’

‘Totally,’ he said. ‘When he’s really young – the book says they’re like sponges at that age, the amount of information they can soak up.’

‘The book said “sponges”?’

‘No, I say sponges. The book said something about educational psychology and the importance of pre-language development or something.’

‘Sponges is better.’

‘I thought so.’

‘And maybe other languages,’ she said. ‘It must be brilliant, to speak lots of languages.’

‘I can only speak English.’

‘Me too. Well, a bit of French, but I’m rubbish at that.’

‘We’ll get a tutor.’

‘Or just ask Mum,’ she smiled. ‘She speaks Spanish and Hindi.’ Rosie had always thought it was cool, that her mum was a translator. It seemed powerful.

‘Oh yeah,’ Kaz laughed, ‘of course.’

‘He’s going to be a busy baby,’ she said. ‘Lucky we have a big family to help.’

And they were lucky, she knew. Incredibly so.