He dropped the axe onto the ground and walked to the only bench in the garden – a carved wooden swing-seat beneath the oak. Piotr sat down next to him. Kaz was slim and neat. Piotr filled two-thirds of the seat by himself and the whole swing creaked when he sat on it, but Kaz didn’t seem to notice. And then Piotr waited. Because one thing he had learned was that sometimes you need to leave the space for someone else.

‘I was angry,’ he said.

Piotr waited, quietly. His feet were firmly planted on the ground – he didn’t want the seat to start swinging.

‘With the doctors,’ Kaz said, looking up. ‘I thought they’d done something wrong.’

Perhaps they had, thought Piotr, but he didn’t say that. He didn’t say anything.

There was a strong wind high above them, clouds moving rapidly through the sky, across the sun, sinking the garden into brief shade before releasing the light again.

‘But then, they sent someone round here this morning. Early. And she said that they wanted to take Will. I mean, take him back to the … their building.’

He looked so young, Kaz, that Piotr found himself wondering where his parents were. Surely he shouldn’t have been left here to deal with this on his own. Where was his wife? Where was Holly? Well, Holly was inside, with Rosie. But he had parents, they would have been there yesterday. Kaz had talked about them at the interview, said how much his dads were looking forward to having a grandson.

‘Should I have said no?’

The words startled Piotr, though there was no other sound around them. He looked up, saw Kaz’s wide-open eyes, searching his as if he had the answer to anything.

‘Rosie said she wanted to know why,’ he said. ‘So we agreed. But we couldn’t send Will alone, with that woman and no one he knew or anything. So I went with him.’

‘Back to the birthing centre?’

Kaz cringed. ‘That’s where they started asking me all of their questions.’

‘They did what?’

‘They needed to know everything we’d done,’ he said. ‘That’s how …’

They’d questioned him? Like he was a suspect?

‘I mean, that was when I realised …’

‘They had no right,’ Piotr was saying. ‘They had no—’

‘It must have been my fault.’

‘No.’ They were covering something up. Piotr knew it as surely as he knew his own name. He had to talk to Eva, this was huge, this was …

Kaz was looking down at his feet now, his head bowed.

Piotr swallowed, placed his hand on Kaz’s shoulder but Kaz shrugged it away.

‘I must have done something wrong,’ he said.