Anya looked at me with wide, shocked eyes. I hated myself then for frightening her. I wished the baby hadn’t seen my actions too.

Then my wife’s face crumpled and she began to cry, silently at first.

Covering her eyes with her hands, she slid down the wall into a ball on the carpet and I felt something soften inside me. I went round and crouched next to her, pulling her into my arms where she shook and sobbed.

She said something I couldn’t decipher and I gently asked her to repeat it.

Anya pulled away and then looked up at me, her eyes pink-tinged and her nose running a glistening line to her top lip.

‘I’m being punished, Ell,’ she said, bottom lip squaring into another sob. ‘It’s never going to go away. I’ll never be allowed to be happy.’

I hugged her and shushed her, much as I had our baby ten minutes before. I told her she wasn’t being punished and that she needed to stop thinking that way.

She murmured something else into my shoulder.

‘What’s that?’

‘She hates me,’ she said. ‘The baby.’

This chilled me. I had no idea what to say and just hugged her a little harder.

AUTUMN 2003

LIAM

Liam checks his watch as the bus winds its way around the lanes. It’s cloudy but hot today and the heat seems to squeeze his already aching head like a giant fist.

A baby is crying at the front of the bus, a piercing sound that drills into his brain while its mother casts defiant, angry looks around at the other passengers, as though daring them to say anything. An old man is mumbling to himself gently in front of Liam and he sighs at how depressing it all is. Lately, all he can think about is white sand and deep blue sky. Something different to this endless grey that feels like it is filling him up from the inside and suffocating him.

Why on earth they had to meet there, he had no idea.

When he had called Anastasia and told her they needed to talk, that this couldn’t go on any longer, she had been surprisingly calm on the phone. He’d expected a bit more of a fight but she had quietly told him she agreed, then suggested they go for a walk out towards Chesterton where they could speak freely.

He had complained about this plan but she insisted she needed to build up to telling people and that he shouldn’t push her. So he agreed, and now he was on this sick-making bus in the middle of frigging nowhere.