She sat at the table, carefully lain with the newly unpacked wedding china, and surveyed her efforts. In the oven was the most elegant of her signature dishes – a sticky teriyaki salmon – to which she would add an assortment of salads and a vast platter of rosemary-roasted vegetables. In the fridge were nestling two different desserts that she had purchased from the bakery on the high street, but would claim as her own. A white wine was chilling, a red opened on the counter to breathe, a whiskey ready on the sideboard. And following a Sunday spent welcoming a group of friends to their new abode, she and George were well practised in their spiel as tour guides; only when they’d presented the two spare bedrooms and somebody had joked about the need to fill them, had either of their facades faltered.

Veronica’s hands started now towards her belly, but she redirected them to the arrangement of candles on the table. It had never been clear to her why they had decided to keep the miscarriage secret. At eleven weeks, they had not yet told anybody about the pregnancy, so she supposed nobody would miss something that never was. Except that it was, to Veronica, or at least it had been. Sometimes she suspected that not even George understood this fully. But perhaps he was right in what he’d said that day, the only time they’d ever talked about it: it was simply not meant to be. Still, she had seen her belly thickening – no bump but a tender shifting of shape. She had felt her breasts enlarging, and nausea threatening. She had eliminated her intake of alcohol and sushi and undercooked eggs. She had followed the pregnancy app on her phone to see when the baby was the size of a poppy seed, or a pea or a fig. She had prematurely glanced through a book of names. She had in fact thought every minute of every one of those seventy-seven days about that not-meant-to-be being. So by the time the bleeding began – unstoppable, despite George’s practicality; unstoppable, despite her resolve; unstoppable, gushing between her legs – it wasn’t only the ill-formed foetus that they were losing, it was the dream of what that foetus would have become, the imagined future of what they would have become together. All of it bled away from them, and in its wake followed their relationship, as they knew it anyway – their openness, their trust, condemned the moment they stumbled into failure.

The first week after the loss, Veronica had burst into tears in her yoga class, right in the middle of Upward-Facing Dog. The instructor had moved quietly over to her, a healing hand on her back.

A week after that, she had silently streamed tears for the full hour of her facial. The beauty therapist had said nothing, but continued to stroke her skin.

Often still, she will have to hurry out of a shop when she is unexpectedly confronted by a buggy, or a pregnant woman, or a child, like Amelia, or the others she has to see every day at school, and it feels as though she’ll never breathe again.