It had all gone exactly as planned. Ursula and Vee had gone to the Norfolk house as soon as they’d agreed that Ursula would take the baby. Leonie had assumed they would do a private adoption, but her sister had surprised her with a plan that took her back to the mischievousness of their childhoods, made the whole thing feel like a game. What clever sisters they were, fooling the adults. They had registered Leonie with a local Norfolk GP using Ursula’s name. She’d been referred to the local maternity unit straight away and given a strict talking-to about not seeing the doctor earlier in her pregnancy. And then they’d waited two and a half months out. That time in Norfolk was when Leonie had written the beginnings of her book on why everything women believe about motherhood is wrong, lumbering from desk to loo to bed and wondering, before she fell asleep at night, whether she would be looking back at this version of herself when the thing was born, laughing at her ignorance, brain turned to mush and her whole world centred on a baby attached to her nipple. Manuscript in the bin. She may as well have done. No one has wanted the other three.

But it didn’t happen that way, thank goodness.

It had actually all been easy enough. Well, apart from pushing the little slimy squib of a thing out. That had hurt. But the drugs were good, and after she told them to fuck right off when they tried to shave her and give her an enema, she got all the drugs she wanted. Ursula had been reading something about how they might not be good for the baby but she had told her to fuck right off, too.

In an ideal world, she would have never looked at the kid when it was born, and let Ursula take it away straight away and get on with raising it. But there was a pretence to keep up, so the baby was wrapped in a towel and given to Leonie to hold. She looked into its face and felt – relief, that she felt nothing. She had never understood the cooing that went on over babies – had never played with a doll, come to that – so she had first assumed, and then, as the pregnancy progressed, hoped that she would feel nothing. And she didn’t. She kept her gaze on its hairline to begin with, in case its eyes held an ambush. But when she looked, cautiously, at them, as brown as her own, she felt nothing more than interest. It was a baby. It looked like one. The bits of it – fingernails, ears – she could admire the way she admired anything intricate and thoughtfully made or grown: a Frida Kahlo painting, or the reading room at the British Library, which she likes to think of as a tribute to a clitoris.