Bobby was already in bed by the time Laura got home that night. She had tried to get back earlier, but even her so-called crap accounts had taken up too much of her time that day. As soon as she walked into the house she crept into her son’s room and tiptoed up to the cot. Now she had to make do with staring at his sleeping body, wrapped up in his sleeping bag, flat out, arms splayed at his sides. Laura hovered over him, breathing in his smell, longing to reach down and pull him out of his cot, hold him against her, feel his warmth and his tiny head of soft, downy hair pressing against her face.

It was funny, she realised; she had never thought she would feel like this – so desperate to be with her baby son, so guilty that she wasn’t.

Laura gripped the sides of the cot as she watched Bobby, her eyes filling with tears as his eyelids fluttered, and wondered what was going through his mind. What dreams he could be having. She mustn’t lean too close in case he woke. Nate had told her Bobby hadn’t settled for a while, that he’d had to sit with him in the rocking chair until he did.

She’d known something would give, when she went back to work. She’d had the discussion with her NCT friends months back, when she told them that she felt like a part of her was lost without work. Laura understood that working full-time meant there would be times when she wouldn’t see Bobby before he went to bed, or when she’d be out of the house before he woke, and at the time she was okay with that. It was a sacrifice she was prepared to make because she would come home, satisfied and buzzing, able to throw herself into the time she did have with her family.

She had never expected to feel so desperate and vulnerable, and as she peered at her beautiful son, she hated that Chrissie and the other NCT mums were right. She couldn’t have everything and she no longer knew what to sacrifice. All she did know was that she definitely wasn’t happy.

With a deep sigh Laura eventually retreated and went downstairs, wiping a hand across her face before Nate noticed she was upset. They were seeing the other couples and their babies this weekend and Laura didn’t particularly want to face them all, yet it had been in the diary for weeks. There was no good way of escaping it. She had known for a long time she’d never be true friends with this group of women. Their hearts were often in the right place but they didn’t understand her one bit, and she certainly couldn’t talk to them about how awful her first weeks back at work had been.