I helped her dress and gathered up the bags she had packed so carefully. She sat on the couch, clutching her stomach, and tried her best to relay instructions between laboured breaths.

‘Don’t forget the orange bag. The one with the babygrows.’

‘You can barely stand,’ I said, stroking her hair. ‘Would you please stop trying to micromanage this?’

She placed her arm over my shoulder and I helped her to the door.

‘Wait,’ she said, ‘wait.’

We stood over the threshold. ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.

‘This will be the last time it’s just the two of us,’ she said. ‘When we come back here, it’ll be with him.’ It felt ridiculous to admit but I hadn’t considered it. The pregnancy had occupied so much of our cognitive energy that I hadn’t given a single thought to what came afterwards. To the result of the pregnancy. To the fact that we would share our home with a third party. That our lives would become his.

When panic sent a fresh wave through the waters of my body I kissed her on the forehead and said, ‘Can we please go now?’

The roads were empty in the storm winds. Through the sheets of rain that lashed the windscreen and the gusts that rocked our little car we saw the world one heartbeat at a time. I remember the landscape around us looked like black waves in the darkness.

We are all just ships at sea, I thought, tiny vessels.

And when we reached the hospital she waded into the waters of the birthing pool and I watched as he was born beneath them. I held him in my arms and he screamed into the freezing air, his tiny body shivering.

They both slept while the sun rose. I remember how the room filled with a cold yellow light. And when the doctor discharged her I placed Phineas in his car seat and fumbled with the straps, and as we made our way past the nurses’ station and out towards the elevators I waited for someone to stop us. For a doctor to take the child into his arms and scold the two of us. Because surely there had to be some kind of orientation? Some aptitude test. A questionnaire we were required to fill in and return, some examination we had to pass before they let us take a life out into the world. But when no one came we filed into the elevator and then out into the car park, and with each footstep we were changed.

I remember the first song that played on the radio as I took the two of them home. And how I held him in those first weeks as if he were a small bird, his bones hollow, his body impossibly weak. I remember Simone in a dressing gown dancing with him in the kitchen. I remember bathing his pink and wrinkled body. I remember a tiredness so consuming that I could taste the blue of electricity. I remember laughter, too, but it has vanished now into the hollow spaces of my mind.