I put my foot on the brake but the car fails to stop. I take my hands from the wheel entirely and find it turns on its own. We continue to skulk up the steep incline of the mountain. I feel the pull of gravity in my stomach.

‘I came home from work one day and her feet had swollen so badly she looked like a cartoon. She told me he was the size of a honeydew melon and that he had a favourite song. I didn’t believe it until she put it on the stereo and let me feel him bouncing around in there.’

I sob openly, resting my head against the driver’s side window. Searching desperately in the wing mirrors for any sign of flashing lights. A routine traffic stop. An authority figure.

‘She carried him for nine months. He grew inside her. What did I do, besides paint his room a pea green and put together a couple pieces of flatpack furniture? She gave herself to him. She became his home. Can you imagine anything so intimate?’

When it was time I drove her to the hospital in the dead of night. She panted in the passenger seat, clutching her belly. I told her hold on, just hold on. Sometimes at night I close my eyes and I can still see the streetlights swaying in the storm winds. The car a life raft in the darkness.

‘We got him home and everyone who came by the house said he was beautiful but I couldn’t see it. It felt like a conspiracy. He was this pink, ruined thing. He ate with his eyes screwed shut. He slept that way too. And in the night when he woke and called out he looked just the same. We gave him everything we had but it still wasn’t enough. I felt suffocated. I felt broken. But not Simone. At some point we switched roles. When it became too much she took the wheel. She told me hold on, just hold on. She knew that it would come right, and it did. Being his father was the great privilege of my life. But it remained difficult. Perhaps more difficult than it should ever have to be.’

I’m quiet for a moment.

‘Every time I saw myself in him it made me want to run. You know how kids put their hands to glass and smear it? That’s how it felt. He was this beautiful, pure thing. And my fingerprints stained him. It was like looking into a black mirror.’

XXXIX

The therapist sits up in the back seat and stares at me through the rear-view mirror. Her eyes like pools of moonlight in the dark. ‘Tell me about the night you left,’ she says.

I strain my eyes, trying to spot anything on the horizon that I recognise. ‘This isn’t where I’m supposed to be. I want to go home. It’s late. Simone will be going out of her mind.’

‘You’re going exactly the right way. We have nothing but time. Tell me about the night you left.’