You came home but life stayed far from normal.

For some time, although I was exhausted, I struggled to sleep. My world became a dull blur of night and day. Footsteps in the street woke me, night after night, and I stood at the window, drawing the edge of the curtain round my body, looking out at the dark road and the soft stripes of lamplight along the pavement. Sometimes I thought I saw a figure there in the shadows, looking across the street to our house, and I imagined it was Richard, coming home again too, coming back to us.

When I went back to bed, my body shook as if the mattress were vibrating beneath me. The hard outlines of the wardrobe, the chest of drawers, the bedside table, melted and swayed as I watched.

During the day, I tried to stay calm, for your sake. I delivered you to nursery each morning, collected you each lunchtime, took you to soft play and to the library and to parties. But wherever I went, a shadow hung behind me, just out of sight. I never saw it. I felt it. A feeling or a phantom? I didn’t know. All I knew was that when I turned to catch it, to look it in the eye, there was nothing but empty air.

Inside, I felt as if the physical laws of the universe, which all my life had formed the solid edges of my world, warped and gave way around me. When I think back to that time, my memories are a swirling snowstorm of static with occasional moments of horrible clarity.

Richard sensed something. He was the one who urged me to see a doctor. That in itself gave me hope that he still cared about me, at least a little. In the early days, when we first met, he made me feel so cherished. A beautiful word. He still cherishes you, Gracie. You must believe that. He carried on loving you long after his love for me died.

Do you remember the days before he left us for that awful woman? You slept so badly as a baby and he sat with you in his arms for hours on end, stroking the soft line of your back with tenderness. I’d wake with a start and reach for him across the bed only to find a rumpled absence and then pad through, bleary-eyed, to your room to find him in the armchair, a dark shape in the half-light, patiently caressing you back into sleep.

The doctor said I was experiencing post-traumatic shock. She prescribed tablets to help my nerves, as she put it. I don’t know what was in them but I did take them each night for a while, mostly to please Richard, and gradually the wardrobe and chest of drawers settled back into place and let me sleep a little.

On the surface, we began to return to our old life, you and I, but it was a lie. We had both changed.

All I wanted now was to be with you. The bank agreed to let me take a leave of absence. Unpaid, of course, but I calculated that, if I was careful, we could manage on savings and the money from Richard. It would only be short-term, just until September when you’d start school and pull away from me, into your own world.

So in the afternoons, when you came out of nursery, we spent time together, living simply, just enjoying ourselves. You so nearly left me, my love, and suddenly nothing seemed more precious than being with you. I thought of the last few years and the hours I’d spent in offices, chairing meetings, running training programmes and suddenly I didn’t want to miss another minute of your life.

We read stories and crayoned and, if it was dry enough, we wrapped up warmly and went to the park, with its bouncy animals and seesaws and roundabouts and a brightly coloured train with an engine and carriages to sit inside where we shouted ‘Tickets, please!’ and ‘All aboard for Toyland!’, and imagined chuffing off on adventures.

Life seemed simpler. I realised, for the first time, that most things didn’t matter. If you wouldn’t put your coat on and wanted another story instead, why not? If you threw your spaghetti Bolognese on the floor or smeared finger paint on your clothes, who cared about the mess? You were alive and well and I was so grateful I sometimes felt I couldn’t breathe.

You were different too. It took me a while to realise. I assumed at first that you were quieter because you were still convalescing but it was more than that.

Your drawings changed. You always loved to crayon – well, scribble in multi-colours the way small children do – announcing, if I asked what you were drawing: ‘I’m not drawing, Mummy, I’m writing.’

When you first started, at the age of about two and a half, you only used black. Whole pages of princesses and rabbits and fairies were devastated by thick dark lines, etched with deep concentration by a small scrunched fist. That wasn’t long after Richard had finally packed his bags and, after more than a year of rows and threats and time apart and struggles to reconcile, he’d left for good. I remember worrying that you were prematurely traumatised, that you were becoming the world’s first toddler Goth.

Now, though, you went to the other extreme. You wore the yellow crayon to a blunt stump. You drew with the tip of your tongue sticking out between your lips, lost in your work as deeply as any Michelangelo. I sat at the table with you, colouring neatly and evenly inside the lines by way of example, and watched your passion as you made strong strokes of brightness across the paper, then sat back to consider them, then dipped again back into work.

‘That’s lovely, Gracie.’ I pointed at the streaks across the paper. ‘Look at all that yellow. It’s like sunshine…’

You barely acknowledged me. You were too intent, too serious. You were nearly four years old and you knew your own mind. When a picture was done, ended as abruptly as it began, you pushed it away from you, dropped your crayon and slipped from the chair, running through to the sitting room with the same intense focus with which you did everything, to find something else to do.

And then you started to make extraordinary claims, saying you’d seen things so bizarre I didn’t know what to make of them.