When she was sleeping peacefully, I took a deep breath and steeled myself to talk to Doug. ‘I know the circumstances are awful,’ I began cautiously, whispering in the darkness, ‘but this, surely, is the answer to our prayers. You heard Rose, she’ll get us the necessary paperwork so we can get a birth certificate saying she’s ours. They’ll think Lana died with her mother, that her body was lost at sea. No one need ever know.’

He kept repeating the same thing, saying it was morally wrong, that we could get into terrible trouble. I thought I’d never change his mind. But when Lana woke a few hours later in the middle of the night, I passed her to him while I went to make up her milk. When I came back, he was sitting on the end of the bed holding her, an expression on his face as he gazed down at her that I’d never seen before. It was a scene I’d imagined so many times throughout those endless years and years of hope and disappointment, and I felt a lump lodge itself in my throat. I sat down next to him and silently passed him the bottle.

‘I was thinking,’ he murmured as we watched her drink. ‘What if you’re right? What if this is our only chance? If we never did manage to have our own, or for some reason couldn’t adopt. What then?’ He looked at me. ‘You’d never forgive me, would you?’ He sighed and added, ‘I don’t think I’d ever forgive myself.’

I closed my eyes. Could this be true? Could we really be about to do this? Careful not to disturb Lana, I put my arms around him. We both watched as she fell asleep again, her little head with its beautiful thick dark hair on his chest. Our daughter. I felt overcome with happiness.

The days following our decision were utterly surreal. The practicalities of adjusting to new parenthood, the fear of what would happen if we were discovered, the guilt we felt about her real family, was interspersed with the pure joy of having Lana so suddenly and unexpectedly in our lives. She was absolutely perfect. We decided to call her Hannah after my grandmother, and that was when it began to feel as though she was really and forever ours. But there was a huge amount of fear and anxiety too. We had to keep her existence secret from the world while we worked out how to pass her off as our own. Luckily, the house we lived in then was down a lane, set slightly apart from our neighbours, so there was nobody to hear her when she cried. We would take it in turns to drive to a town far away from our village to buy her formula and nappies.