Sylvia had tried her hardest to get Evelyne to explain everything to Anna: why she wanted to see her, what she would be writing about, what newspaper she worked for. Evelyne swore she had, but when they turned up at Anna and Daniel’s pokey sixth-floor flat in a suburb of Lausanne, Sylvia wasn’t convinced Anna had given a single thought to having her story in a newspaper – she simply seemed excited to see Sylvia again, and it occurred to her that perhaps she was the only pregnant woman Anna knew, the only person she could get some much needed reassurance from.

With Evelyne as translator, Sylvia answered the many questions Anna flung at her when she was hardly through the door: had Sylvia had breathlessness (yes), heartburn (no), and insomnia (yes, most nights, out of worry, mainly), like Anna had? Was she excited to meet her baby (of course, she said, I wish, she thought), was she scared about the birth (not really, but only because she’d hardly dared give it a thought)?

Anna ushered them into the battered wooden chairs she said the previous tenant had left behind, and served them glasses of tap water. They didn’t yet have a table; the only other furniture in the studio flat was a bed, neatly made up by the window. Evelyne had given them a few pots and pans for the kitchenette, and that was it. The place was tiny and dark without the main light, which was just a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. Sylvia thought of her and Jim’s airy sitting room with its bay window and polished wooden floorboards, their spacious kitchen, and the spare room that would be the baby’s, Jim having diligently painted the walls pale yellow.

After two stressful months crammed into Evelyne’s flat, Anna and Daniel had finally managed to move out, Evelyne had told her with relief (brother and sister, it transpired, were not designed to live together as adults), after Daniel took on two jobs. So in addition to working on a building site in the daytime, he was also making croissants in a bakery in the early hours of each morning. How he found time to sleep, Sylvia didn’t know. And how lonely Anna must be, holed up in this tiny flat on her own, in a new city where she didn’t know anyone. Sylvia had wondered if Anna could get a job herself, but Evelyne had said no. She was sixteen, pregnant and unmarried – even if someone would take her on, it would be risky to make herself ‘seen’; she and Daniel couldn’t get married until they both came of age, and until then she was at risk of being sent back to the farm, or some awful women’s detention centre, if the authorities found her – and then her child might be taken from her and given up for adoption.