Neither could Sylvia. She still had trouble comprehending this baby was hers. Something that ate and slept and peed and cried. A tiny little human, made from hers and Jim’s genes. She and Maggie watched as Jessica stirred in her sleep, flinging her tiny arm sideways to rest against a soft toy Sylvia had bought her on their first tentative trip outside the flat: a brown donkey with a red ribbon and a jaunty look in his marble eyes. Spontaneously, she’d bought the same for Anna’s baby, Hedi, and had posted it to Evelyne’s flat for her to pass on. She’d had the impression Anna wouldn’t be able to give very many toys to Hedi. Plus, she liked the idea that the two of them, born on the same day in the same hospital, would have the same furry body to cuddle in their beds as they grew up. Something to link them to their common beginnings, whatever happened in their futures.

It wasn’t the first time Sylvia’s thoughts had drifted back to Anna and her baby; they’d occupied her mind frequently since she’d left Switzerland three weeks ago. She remembered finding Anna crying in the hospital, the look of utter desolation in her face. Though Sylvia couldn’t tell her so, she’d recognised how daunted Anna must have felt to have a baby to care for, at the age of sixteen, with little money and no family to help her. Though she had Daniel, there was an ingrained sadness about her that Sylvia guessed came from being without close family for so long.

An aloneness.

She hoped it wouldn’t always be so. She hoped having Hedi would give her back the sense of family life she lost when she was ripped away from her mother and sister.

‘Speaking of beautiful things,’ Maggie said. ‘Where did that come from?’ She nodded to the shiny new electric typewriter sitting on the desk in the bay window.

‘Jim,’ Sylvia said.

Maggie ran her hands over the keys. ‘Must have cost a packet.’

‘An investment, that’s what he said.’

She’d blamed it on the hormones when she cried after Jim came home with it one day, but actually she was knocked off kilter by his generosity and the message behind it – that he was offering her this beautiful new machine so she could keep writing, freelancing, if she wanted to.

‘Any extra cash would come in handy, after all,’ he’d joked. But she knew it wasn’t about that. She knew he finally understood that, while motherhood had turned out to be far more enriching than she could have imagined, writing was just as intrinsic to her happiness, to her sense of self.