They looked so similar. That’s what struck her. Both hairless, wrinkled, red-faced bundles. Both with several days in an incubator ahead of them. Both so tiny; little hands curled into small fists, as though they were spoiling for a fight. She supposed they were. Fighting to get out of there.

‘She’ll be okay, you know,’ Sylvia said, even though she knew Anna couldn’t understand. A nurse had brought her to the nursery in a wheelchair, just hours after the operation that had made her feel like she’d been run over by a truck, and there she found Anna, staring at her daughter. Sylvia’s own baby – as yet unnamed, she was waiting for Jim – was in the incubator next to Anna’s, and the two little girls could have been twins, so alike they looked. They even lay in the same pose – tiny arms flung above their heads. She supposed all babies looked the same at this age. Only the ankle tags said whose baby was whose. Bébé Mela, Bébé Tallis.

Sylvia squeezed Anna’s hand and the girl looked at her, tears filling her eyes. She seemed traumatised, perhaps by the natural birth that Sylvia felt quietly lucky to have escaped, despite the pain she bore now, perhaps overwhelmed by the reality of having a baby, of the task ahead of her. Sylvia thought back to the day they met, of the hope and excitement she’d seen in Anna’s face, and her words during the interview, the love she was ready to give – but that all seemed to have vanished. Instead she saw simply a very young, very scared 16-year-old, daunted by what she’d done.

It felt like their roles had reversed, because for the first time since she’d found out she was pregnant, Sylvia felt calm, contented. She’d never much cared for other people’s babies. Didn’t know how to handle them. Didn’t know what to do when they cried. Didn’t understand their wordless communication. But when she’d seen her daughter for the first time a few hours earlier, and when she looked now at this little being, fresh out of the box, she didn’t feel fear; she felt, to her considerable relief, only love.

How? That, she didn’t know. Had it been there all along, waiting for this child to arrive, or was it a chemical reaction born of the fact that she shared her genes with this little body, that an invisible line connected them?

After months of anxiety and fear, a calmness had descended upon her. She loved her child. Maybe that meant she wouldn’t be a terrible mother, maybe she wouldn’t turn bitter with resentment. Maybe, in fact, there was a chance things wouldn’t turn out as badly as she’d feared.