EVA WAS READY. She’d set up her office in the piano room and cleared the kitchen table. Her laptop was on, everything in the correct folders. Emails going back years. The press file with clippings, websites, announcements. She’d drawn up a timeline of what FullLife had done, from the day they’d been granted the right to human trials, through their introduction of Holly and the protests that followed. Up to the one that had turned violent. She wasn’t born at the time but it made her feel sick, when she thought of how they’d slashed open those pouches. Twelve babies dead. Then the backlash, the rallying of support around Holly and her new daughter. The introduction of used pouches for people without a FullLife plan leading to the slow, often unreported, reassignment of contracts from the NHS to FullLife. Not just maternity wards – entire hospitals, every aspect of health care. At first it was presented as a ‘partnership’. Then a merger.

She paced from the office to the kitchen and back to her desk again. One hour. She’d told him to come, and he was coming. In one hour. She looked around the office and laughed. Perhaps she wasn’t prepared at all, but at least she had done her filing.

It didn’t feel good to know that she was right about FullLife, or about the dangers of the pouch. It was too late anyway, for her and Piotr, no point in thinking about what difference this proof might have made. They were over a long time ago, and she had no interest in saying I told you so. In fact, she was going to find it difficult to tell him everything she knew – worried she’d be opening wounds that hadn’t healed. At least, they hadn’t healed for her.

She forced herself to sit down in one of the chairs she’d positioned by the window. Outside, a robin was pecking at the grass growing between the stones of her patio. It seemed to feel her gaze and sped away almost as soon as she’d noticed it. She was glad. But the memory had already surfaced.

Eva had been sitting on their sofa, reading, when she’d heard the unmistakable thud of something soft, something alive, hitting the window that looked out over their shared garden in north London. She’d known what had happened even as she glanced up wondering what had made the noise, as she walked towards the window to look down at the tiny body of a long-tailed tit lying on the grass far below.