They meet eyes then, two sets of such similar light brown, like they are twins. The sadness in Liam’s chest seems to swell. Something softens in her expression and he feels the creep of her hand reaching for his. They squeeze hands tightly and a kind of relief, a glimpse not of peace, but of a time when it might be on the horizon, steals into his brain.

‘I’ll explain that it was all about the coke,’ he says. ‘And that I gave it to you.’ His words are coming out too quickly now, in the relief of this being so much easier than he expected. ‘I bet it will be worse for me than it will for you at the end of the day.’

Anastasia nods vigorously, eyes shining with tears that are welling there and gets up from the bench.

‘No point putting it off any longer then, is there?’ she says, and Liam gets up too.

They start to walk back towards the car park and then Liam notices a figure standing just by the start of the path. A middle-aged man, strongly built, who is staring at them oddly.

Anya pushes ahead and Liam wants to call her back because there is something unnerving about this guy. That’s when he notices something in his hands, which he is holding lightly behind his back.

It’s a golf club.

Fear sparks inside him now and he cries, ‘Anastasia!’ But she walks up to the man and squeezes his arm. A look passes between them. Anastasia gives a tiny shake of the head and a rueful downturn of the lips before climbing into the black car she was leaning against earlier on.

‘What the fuck is going on here?’ says Liam and he knows his voice sounds scared and childish, but he can’t care about that because, too quickly, the man is raising the golf club over his head and Liam’s next sound is a cry of shock and pain.

I think I placed too much hope in the transformative effect of the baby’s arrival.

Of course, it is a massive change for the two of them in all the usual ways: the sleepless nights, mess and disruption. That’s not what I mean, though.

I believed – and maybe she did too – that some form of alchemy would occur inside her after the birth, something that would turn that baffling, numb place she manages to hide so well into something that beat and pulsed with powerful, all-encompassing emotion.

I know I was changed by my two births in all sorts of ways, good and bad, and I suppose I just assumed she would be the same, even though she marched to a different drum in all sorts of ways.

The pure love I felt when I saw their little faces was a surprise. Where had that been? I couldn’t understand where it could have been hiding until then.