I make my excuses, keen to get away after Miranda’s unsettling words, and I drag a briefly grumbling Mina out onto the street, bribed with promises of an ice lolly when we get back. It was a good job Leo wasn’t born at home, although Miranda’s words caused a shiver to run down my spine, the hairs on the back of my neck pricking to attention. The baby’s birth was the complete opposite to Mina’s. Things had started well, but I didn’t progress as I should have done – things were taking longer and longer, and I was growing more and more exhausted. Everything fades to a blur when I try to think back now, walking home to the cottage with Mina skipping along beside me. Rav told me after that the baby wasn’t in the right position, that his tiny body inside mine was stuck. Hours after my waters had broken, hours spent pushing and pushing with nothing happening, I vaguely remember being so tired that I barely noticed when a contraction came. My hair was stuck to my face and there was a raging thirst burning in the back of my throat, nausea bubbling up after every hit of gas and air, before there was a flurry of activity that Rav tells me later was a whole team of midwives and doctors that rushed into the room. There is tugging, pulling, a feeling of somehow being violated although I can’t feel anything thanks to an expertly timed epidural. The only scene that stands out, clear and bright in my mind, is the sight of the baby in the midwife’s arms as she carries him to the baby station, trying to shield him from my view. In addition to his getting stuck, the cord was wrapped tightly around his neck, a deafening silence filling the room as he was finally yanked from my body. The image of his small limbs hanging loosely, his skin a terrifying bluish-white, crowds my vision and I blink hard, looking down into the pram to his fat, pink cheeks. He was fine, obviously. The doctors did whatever it was he needed and seconds that felt like minutes later, he was crying angrily as if enraged at being pulled from his warm, soft space into clinical white light. They placed him in Rav’s arms as I was stitched up and cleaned up, all while feeling as if it was happening to someone else. When they eventually gave him to me, I couldn’t reconcile the shifts and squirms in my belly with this tiny white creature with two marks either side of his head where he had been wrenched from me.

‘Look, Mama, a parcel,’ Mina races up the path to the front door, where a small box sits.