Patrick doesn’t want to hear any of this, as usual. He says it’s ‘a bit of the baby blues, that’s all, nothing to panic about’. He never would truly discuss it. Says now that I need to concentrate my efforts on getting well and to stop panicking about matters that are largely in my head.

He doesn’t see things he doesn’t want to see.

A couple of days after Olivia was born I went round to the house. I had been keeping my illness from Anya for a while but knew I would have to tell her soon. It terrified me that the one person in the world who truly understood her, and loved her all the same, was on borrowed time. But I was so elated at the birth of my granddaughter that I kept putting it off. Who wants to talk about death when birth is so very much nicer?

Elliott told me Anya was just changing the baby but I could go up, so I climbed the stairs, feeling the effort as though there were three times as many.

I came to the small room they had converted into a nursery with primrose yellow walls and a border of silver moons and stars. My heart lifted as I saw my daughter bending over the wooden changing table, two tiny pink legs waving around near her hand. But the baby wasn’t happy about being changed and began to grizzle.

I watched in horror as Anya grabbed one of Olivia’s feet, quite roughly, and swore before telling her to ‘Stop it.’ As if the baby was being disagreeable on purpose!

I rushed in and she started to cry, saying she was just sore and tired and hadn’t meant it.

I took over and told her to nap, while I changed the baby’s nappy with shaking hands.

I carried Olivia – so very carefully – downstairs. Elliott was making tea, oblivious, in the kitchen. I wondered again about talking to him – really talking to him. But I’d tried before and sounded a bit mad, plus I wasn’t sure what he did and didn’t know.

I smiled as his whole face lit up at the sight of his baby daughter, swaddled and sleepy now in a yellow crocheted blanket.

He is besotted with Olivia, I think.

Thank goodness.

But he can’t be there all the time, can he? And he would never believe me. He thinks she is so much better than he is, that’s the trouble. That’s why she chose him.

Now she has the baby, it changes everything.

Anya isn’t the priority, for the first time ever.

I have to think about Olivia now.

SUMMER 2019

IRENE