The tears flowed down my cheeks and, while Barky cradled my head to his bony chest, I placed my hands on my belly, in horror and awe. All this time I’d been so careful – how could this have happened to me? There was one time, only one: the night Vincent had comforted me when I first saw Nosizwe. Me, a mother? It couldn’t be. My head swirled amid the shouting all around, as I contemplated that there were two of us now, inside this body.

We sat like that for a very long time, Barky and I, long enough for the yelling to die down. At last, he said, ‘We’d best be getting home, Zillah.’

‘Vincent’s gone, hasn’t he?’

‘He has, girl. He has.’

‘He left us. He doesn’t want her,’ I whispered to myself.

Somehow, I felt sure the baby I carried was a girl. Fortitude. The name came to me. I would call her Fortitude.

‘For now, but he’ll come back. We’ll explain it to him.’

‘Lucien, too?’

‘That’s right.’

Vincent and Lucien, Lucien and Vincent. So different and yet, in this moment, their actions had been the same. This was why my choice had been so hard. Vincent was wrong for me, always had been. Society was not ready for a couple like us; there was nowhere we could safely be together, and he was not a strong enough man, for all his good intentions. I’d thought the answer was Lucien, but in his own way he too was wrong. He’d taught me to take pride in being Black but he forgot that I was British too, a Londoner who’d fought her way out of St Giles and that meant that, as much as I didn’t belong in Vincent’s world, I didn’t fully belong in Lucien’s either. I had sensed a bitterness in him towards England, which I did not, could not feel when this was all the home I had ever known. With Eustace so long gone, I’d thought I had to choose between them, and in doing so I had tried to choose between the two sides of who I was. But what was it that I had told Barky about cakes and gin fizz? It was not so simple as that. I may have been half-Black and half-white but I was wholly Zillah. That was the choice I would make. Not Vincent, not Lucien. I chose myself.

I thought of the child growing in my stomach. Vincent’s daughter. She would be fair like Barky, but I would make it so that she never felt she had to pass. That she could honour every bit of who she was, and in the meantime, I’d do whatever I could to help make a world where that was possible.

‘We’d best be getting home, Zillah,’ Barky said again.