56

The hospital ward is noisy and overheated. Liv’s body feels broken – the incision across the bottom of her belly throbs with pain whenever she moves – but Liv has never been happier. Her baby lies next to her in the plastic wheeled cot, wrapped up tightly in a blue blanket. Every now and again she leans over and looks at him, to check he’s still there and this is real.

He screams, of course. He cries all the time, his eyes screwed shut, his mouth open, tiny fists pumping in anger. And when he does, she awkwardly picks him up, wincing from the pain in her tummy, and pushes him against her breast. It didn’t work at first, but the midwife showed her how to latch him on and now he has the hang of it, feeding happily as her milk starts to come in.

The nurses come round occasionally, but for the most part she’s alone. She watches the other mothers in their beds, as visitors arrive. The dads, the proud grandparents, bringing presents and cooing over the newborns. They seem like a different species, these families, but Liv doesn’t allow herself the luxury of self-pity; she never has.

But she does let herself think about Robin.

She’s had a message from him. A simple: How are you? She hasn’t replied; she doesn’t know what to say. She feels bad for misleading him about the baby. But when he turned up that day, she couldn’t resist implying they’d slept together. That tiny bit of control was too much of a temptation.

And now she feels embarrassed, letting her guard down when she was in labour, letting him see her at her most vulnerable. She doesn’t like it. She feels beholden to him, like she owes him something, and that’s the feeling she dislikes more than anything.

But she’d liked daydreaming about Robin as the father. A nice man. A decent man. Unlike the real father: one of the bouncers at the club, a married dickhead with kids of his own that she slept with once without a condom when she needed the extra cash. Robin is nothing like him. Instinctively she knows Robin is someone that can be relied on to do the right thing, although the memory stick and the CCTV footage come back into her mind.

What was he doing there, that day with Trevor Stevens? Why was her sister so keen for her to have a copy? But after everything that has happened over the last few days, she doesn’t like the idea of holding onto it. She hates the thought that she could be responsible for something bad happening to Robin.