It is almost six months after Dominic’s birth that Noah’s father, Robert, is diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer, and dies four weeks later. Lewa’s nursing credentials are of no use. Noah’s songs are of no use. And Simone’s baby merely emphasises the great disparity between new life, and the ending of it. Noah’s father spends his final days in a hospice, slipping in and out of morphine-induced oblivion: there, not there, there, not there, not there, not there, not there. The permanence is ultimately what slashes at Noah’s soul. Life had poured through him before, fluid in its promises; but absence, nothingness, these are immobilising realities. The guitar music stops. The bath-times stop. He stops noticing how desperate and detached Simone has become. One evening, the baby crying, both of them hungry, neither moving, she offers him a line she had hidden in her sock drawer. She’d thought by now he must have guessed her habit, but he turns to her with a slow look of disgust, as though observing a ballerina taking off her costume to reveal that beneath the glittered skirts, there is only humanity: bloodied toes, bruised bones. And she watches his face as every last illusion of beauty is shattered.

That night, Noah leaves Simone alone with the baby who cries so much that she is forced to drag herself from the bed to mix his formula and to change his nappy. Without his father, it is her shoulder that the baby must fall asleep on, and despite the melancholy of the day, inhaling the soft breath of her boy, she feels just the smallest whisper of love sprouting. It is not developed, just a hint, but enough to see her through this first night that Noah is missing. When he returns the following lunchtime, he stinks of alcohol and marijuana. He sleeps through the day.

Now it is her turn, Lewa tells her.

Only a year has passed since Robert died, but Lewa is not the kind of woman to let the world crumble around her. Her flat remains immaculate, Sundays still spit out smells of spices, Tupperware is filled as ever with jollof rice and deep-fried yams. At the hospital, she does not miss a shift. Bills are paid, bins are taken out, and she turns up as often as before to sing nutmeg infused gospel-turned-lullaby to Dominic. While she is there, she urges Simone to eat, tutting at her skinniness. She tidies their flat, and she looks at her sunken son through eyes that betray sorrow and regret, as though his unravelling is her failure and not Simone’s. But it is Simone’s turn now, she tells her again.

Dominic has pooed through his nappy and Lewa is showing Simone how to bleach the material of his tracksuit bottoms. Their voices are low under the auspices of Dominic napping, but in truth, Lewa is grabbing the flash of muted air between them to fill it with obligation.

“Now he needs you,” she is saying. “He is too young to give up on living. You are both far too young. It isn’t too late.”