When I reached home, I copied out the name and address of the photographer from the sticky label and hid the paper in a drawer. I didn’t want to risk losing it. Then I made myself a cup of tea and sat alone in the emptiness of the kitchen, considering the label.

It was true then. You and Matt were right. Ella did have a daughter, Catherine Louise. A baby with a shock of ginger hair. This woman, Stella, had documented it. I sipped my tea, thinking. This was the evidence I’d wanted that Ella really did have a child. But how could I prove what she’d done to her?

I fingered the label. These pictures were taken years ago. Stella, whoever she was, might have closed down by now or moved away. Perhaps she would have forgotten Ella, just one of hundreds of clients over the years. Or have nothing to tell me anyway. It was all possible, I knew that. But I had to try. My hands shook as I picked up the phone and dialled the number.

It rang out and I was about to give up when a young woman answered. Her tone was a bored sing-song.

‘Stella’s Photography, how can I help you?’

I took a deep breath. ‘I’d like to make an appointment please. To see Stella. As soon as possible.’

A rustle of paper as she turned the pages of a diary or appointments book.

‘I’m afraid she’s fully booked today.’ Pause. ‘She’s in tomorrow. After lunch. Perhaps around three?’

Later, I took the bus into central London to meet Matt.

I gazed out of the window, distracted by the vibrancy of the outside world. I missed you. You had such a capacity for living in the present, for being excited by the smallest, everyday things: the stripes of a zebra crossing, a cat sunning itself on a flat roof, a small boy on a scooter.

Matt stood at the entrance to the shopping mall, waiting for me. His hands were deep in the pockets of his coat. His chin was dark with twenty-four hours of stubble. My pulse quickened at the sight of him.

‘Darling.’ He opened his arms to me and I disappeared into a hug. He held me so tightly I could barely breathe. When he finally loosened his embrace, he kissed me.

‘Missed you so much.’ He lowered his head and kissed me again, this time for even longer. ‘Thank you for doing this.’ He took my free hand and tucked it away in his pocket inside his own. His fingers, warm and strong, enveloped mine. ‘Toy shop?’

‘Lead on.’

I stood ahead of him on the escalator and he wrapped his arms round my waist as if he couldn’t bear to be parted from me for a minute.

It was large, brightly coloured toy shop with animated displays in glass cases. Small children stood with their noses pressed against one, watching trains whirr through tunnels and over bridges. Inside the next, there was a fairground made of play bricks. The roundabout, complete with small figures, was slowly turning, a set of swings rocking mechanically back and forth. A small girl looked lost in it.

Matt set off down an aisle, picking up boxes, looking at them briefly, then pushing them back on the shelf. His shoulders were tight and hunched. I watched, sad for him.

He wouldn’t talk to me about Katy or his ex. There was so much I wanted to know about them both but I’d learned not to ask any more. If I tried to, even the vaguest question, he frowned and his mood darkened. So I was very conscious, as I trailed after him, that I was setting out across thin ice.

I found him at the far end of the shop, frowning at a display of jigsaws.

‘How old is she going to be? Eight?’

He nodded quickly, walked a little further away.

I tried to imagine you at eight. Tried to imagine missing all those years between now and then and the pain of choosing gifts without knowing what to send.

I caught up with him again and stood at his shoulder. He stared down at the picture of a little girl on a box, her blonde hair tied back in a ponytail, her face beaming as she played with a doll’s tea set.

‘Maybe a bit young?’

He didn’t answer. He looked utterly miserable. I wondered how he’d managed to do this on his own, year after year.

‘What about something to make?’

I walked on down the aisle, scanning the brightly coloured boxes, the shiny mass-produced plastic. Paints and felt tips and crayons. Stamps and moulds. I picked up a junior tapestry kit with a picture of a pair of kittens.

‘I had one of these.’ Mine had shown a cat sleeping in the doorway of a country cottage with roses round the door. A gift from an aunt and uncle. I smiled to myself. I hadn’t thought of it for years. It kept me busy for a whole Easter holiday and we’d framed it afterwards. It must be in a box somewhere. ‘I loved it.’

He came to look, turned it over, his voice doubtful. ‘I don’t know.’

I put it back, moved him on to sewing kits. Make a fabric doll. Sew a set of doll’s clothes.

‘What about this?’ I turned it over. ‘Age seven to ten.’

He frowned. ‘I’m not sure.’

It wasn’t like him to be so indecisive. He seemed frightened. Afraid to get it wrong. This was his only link to his daughter until Christmas, assuming she was even given these gifts. I wanted to help but I didn’t know how. I had no idea what she might like and, from the way he was behaving, neither did he. I put my hand on his arm and gave it a squeeze.

‘Let’s keep looking.’

We moved on to the next aisle.

‘A game?’

I tried to remember being eight. I played a lot of board games with my father. He was patient. I realised now that he must have been tired when he came home from the lab but he always had time for me. He spent a long time teaching me chess.

I reached up, past the stacks of draughts and chess and classic family games and lifted down a box. The glossy picture showed a family of actors, a beaming mum and dad and a perfect boy and girl sitting between them, all waving their hands and exclaiming in delight. It didn’t look like any family I’d ever seen. His face, taking it all in, was dejected.

I pushed the box back, moved him on past more games and a bank of jigsaws and came finally to a small display of books.

‘The Hobbit.’ I took it down and handed it to him. ‘Loved it. Didn’t you?’

He thumbed through in silence.

‘Just the right age for it too. Eight.’

He stopped, looked more closely at one of the old-fashioned line drawings. ‘Maybe.’ He didn’t sound convinced.

‘And you can write a message in the front with the date. She’ll have it forever.’

He hesitated, thinking this over. ‘She might already have it.’

Of course she might. He could say the same about any book I suggested. About any game we found. He closed the book.

‘I don’t think so.’ He put it back. ‘I’m being a bit useless, aren’t I? I’m sorry.’

I reached up to him, kissed his cheek. His forehead was tight with worry. It was clear how desperately he wanted to get this right and I loved him for it.

‘It’s OK.’

We had almost exhausted the shop when he pulled out a box. Make your own charm bracelets. A girl smiled out, her chin cupped in her hands, her wrists resplendent with pink and white loops of plastic.

‘What about this?’

I took it from him, read the blurb on the back. It was a mixture of beads and miniature charms. I had no idea whether she’d like it or not. It was a blind guessing game. I said: ‘Well, there’s a lot to it.’

He took it back, looked again at the picture, at the smiling girl.

‘It’s not too babyish?’

‘I don’t think so.’

He sighed. We chose a card and a sheet of Happy Birthday wrapping paper, decorated with pink cupcakes, and he finally queued to pay, weighed down by the burden of it all. His shoulders were hunched and he seemed so vulnerable, so fragile. It was a side of him I hadn’t seen before and I felt a surge of affection for him, for this man who had appeared from nowhere and inserted himself in our lives, who tried so hard to look after me when he saw me struggle.

Afterwards, he found me at the door of the shop with his plastic bag in hand and we ventured together into the bustle of the shopping centre. He looked dazed. I threaded an arm round his waist and hugged him and his face, when he turned back to me, was sad.

‘Thank you.’ He kissed me on the tip of my nose. ‘No one’s ever done that with me before.’

‘Let’s get some lunch.’

‘I’ve got padded envelopes at home.’ I nodded down to his bag. ‘You write the card and I’ll sort the rest.’

‘That’s sweet.’ He smiled. ‘Thank you.’

That evening, I left Matt in the kitchen, where he was chopping and stirring and steaming, and went for a long, hot bath. I lay soaking, surrounded by bubbles, and thought how unfair life was. That Ella, blessed with a beautiful baby girl, could care for her so little and yet Matt, clearly besotted with his daughter, was so cruelly forced apart from her.

I picked up the set of ducks on the side of the bath and set them free to bob round the islands of my knees. I wondered if you were asleep in bed now, tucked up under your rainbows and unicorns with bear. I missed you, my love. Always. The house was never the same without you in it.

I read an article once about a mother with terminal cancer who bought and wrapped Christmas and birthday presents for her young children, all the way through to their twenty-first birthdays. I often thought about that.

First, about how anyone could bear to do such a heart-breaking thing. Then, about what I would choose for you, if I knew I were being taken away, leaving you to grow up without me. It struck me as a courageous act, that woman’s desperate attempt to defeat time and to stay present in her children’s lives for all those years into the future. And yet it was strangely melancholy too. What if the gifts were the wrong ones? If the children simply didn’t grow into the people she expected them to be, without the tastes, the interests she imagined? Like Matt, she simply couldn’t know.

---

‘I was beginning to think you’d drowned.’

Matt was sitting at the kitchen table, looking over the newspaper. The air was rich with the smell of chicken and the strains of one of my old CDs.

‘I didn’t know you liked Springsteen.’

‘I didn’t know you did.’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘Saw him in concert three times. Amazing.’

I smiled, imagining him as a younger man. I remembered how desperately lonely the evenings were before he came along, the silence and the solitary glass of wine and the early nights. And how normal it seemed now, to have him here in my own kitchen.

He opened an arm to me and I perched on his knee, wrapped my hands round his neck and kissed him.

‘You smell nice.’ He murmured into my neck. ‘You’ve been away far too long.’

‘Sorry.’ My body felt clean and relaxed in sloppy trousers and shirt and I shifted my weight as he ran a hand under my shirt and across my skin. ‘What time’s dinner?’

‘Soon. If you stop distracting me.’ He lifted me down, got to his feet and lit the gas under a pan. ‘About ten minutes.’

I took scissors and tape from a drawer and went through to the sitting room to wrap the bracelets craft set, then sealed the present and birthday card in a padded envelope.

I called through: ‘I can post Katy’s present tomorrow for you, if you like?’

‘That’s OK.’

Before I went back into the kitchen to join him, I sat for a moment, looking at the parcel, trying to imagine the young girl who’d open it, what she’d feel as she tore off the paper, what she remembered, if anything, of the father who’d chosen it with such love and such pain.