Neither of us really knew how to fit the car seat into the car. We hadn’t had a practice run, and as I tried to strap it into the seat, the weight of this new responsibility felt heavy round my shoulders.

Anya seemed cheerful, despite the various physical discomforts, and somehow didn’t lose patience while I battled to get it sorted out. We drove home at about twenty-five mph, just in case it still wasn’t completely safe, and came into the house as three for the first time.

Livi – as we slipped into calling her within days – was asleep and I laid the car seat in the middle of the living room and gazed down at her. Her tiny chin was creased inwards, her lips puckering as she dreamed of suckling.

We met eyes across the room and Anya said, ‘What the fuck do we do now then?’ and we both started to laugh. It was an exhausted, slightly hysterical sound and in that moment, for the first time, I felt something settling inside me. A peace, despite the fear this new unknown brought. Maybe we really could put all the secrets behind us now. Maybe Anya, me, and Livi would be a self-sufficient unit.

But Anya’s post-birth happiness only lasted for a couple of days. The health visitor arrived a few days after she came home and found her crying on the sofa, Livi screaming for milk and in a wet nappy upstairs with the bedroom door closed.

I arrived back from the supermarket a little while later. Anya tried to make light of it, saying she had been told that day three or four was classic ‘baby blues’ time. The health visitor – a young, thin woman with spiky blonde hair, glasses and a gentle country accent – said that it was indeed common to feel like this. But she emphasized that Anya needed to sleep ‘when baby slept’ and generally try to look after herself.

I’d been trying to feed Anya as much as possible but she claimed she felt sick and only seemed to want Diet Coke and toast. When I voiced this to the health visitor, Anya had given me a look that gave me an unpleasant jolt. There was a hardness there, bordering on dislike, that chilled me a little.

The next two weeks, before I went back to work, passed in a blur of broken nights and meals eaten with one hand, our snuffly little animal pressed into our necks, other hand against her squirmy, delicate back.