Feeling closer to him there, Alicia had stayed in the same place for two solid days since coming home from the hospital: sitting in the chair in the nursery. It was an antique rocking chair. Justin had bought it – to make feeding times easier, he’d said. Lucas had been easy to feed, a contented baby. It was a perfect chair for cuddling and snuggling him, though.

Her heart squeezing painfully, Alicia caught a breath in her throat as she recalled how she’d woken from an exhausted sleep shortly after bringing Lucas home, panic immediately engulfing her when she realised it was past his feed time and he wasn’t crying. Her heart rate had slowed to somewhere near normal when she’d found Justin’s side of the bed empty; she’d crept tentatively along the landing to find her husband nestling his son in the crook of his arm, humming softly as he rocked him gently back to sleep.

He’d done it many times since, when he hadn’t been working. Alicia accused him of quietly hoping she would sleep through, so he could spend precious alone time with his son, and Sophie made merciless fun of her dad getting in touch with his feminine side. Alicia had pointed out he’d taken his fair share of night-time feeds with her too, the only difference being they hadn’t had a rocking chair. At this, Sophie had bemoaned her deprived childhood.

Alicia smiled at the memory, and then swallowed hard against the cold stone wedged like ice in her chest. Shivering involuntarily as Lucas’s wind-chime mobile tinkled the softest of sounds, she eased his patchwork quilt higher towards her face, breathing in the smell of him. His smell was everywhere: on her clothes, in her hair. She couldn’t bear to wash him away. He permeated every surface, every wall, every pore of the house.

Looking towards the mobile, sure she could hear his delighted chuckles and gurgles as it jangled, she realised Justin was standing on the landing, watching her, not moving. He didn’t come in. He hadn’t come into the room once since he’d been discharged. Because he couldn’t cope with it. Because his pain was too raw. Alicia could see it. It was etched deep into his eyes.

He needed her. He needed his family, his baby. She couldn’t bear it. Alicia looked away.

‘Can I get you anything?’ he asked hesitantly.

Alicia shook her head. She couldn’t eat. Couldn’t swallow. Couldn’t breathe.

‘Some tea or hot chocolate?’ he tried.

‘We’d only just started weaning him,’ she said, for no reason other than she could see the confusion in Lucas’s beautiful summer-blue eyes when she’d first fed a spoon into his mouth. ‘He opened his mouth for the spoon on Sunday. Soft fruits. He liked soft fruits mixed with his milk.’

Justin breathed in. ‘I know,’ he said throatily.

Another minute stuffed full of silence passed by, then, ‘You should try and eat something, Alicia. At least let me get you some tea?’

Alicia smiled sadly. Her mother had always gone for the kettle in a crisis. A tradition passed on from her gran. A ‘cure-all cuppa’, her gran had called it. It couldn’t cure this, couldn’t take away the ache in her chest where her heart should be. Her hand strayed to the soft round of her tummy. The emptiness where her baby had grown.

She wished her mother was here. That God, in whatever infinite wisdom it was, hadn’t seen fit to take her away from her too. She would have judged her, no doubt she would have done that, but she would have kept loving her. It was selfish, but she needed that love. She desperately needed the love of someone who could know all there was to know and still keep loving her. To be held until her heart had stopped breaking and the unbearable pain went away.

But it wouldn’t go away. Couldn’t. Ever.

Justin, would he hold her? Could he bear to, now that he suspected? And he did. She could feel it. How could she let him? Only to tell him she’d betrayed him in the worst possible way a woman could betray a man? He was bleeding too, just as steadily as her, and she had no idea what to do.

She needed to try. Needed to help him get through this. Could she at least do that, before she broke him completely? Glancing away, she wiped a tear from her face. ‘I’ll come down soon,’ she said, though she had no idea how she would. She couldn’t bear to see Lucas’s things in the kitchen – his little bowl and his feeding cup. Couldn’t conceive the idea of throwing them out. Here she was, surrounded by his things, his tiny baby clothes, his toys, by him. There were no surprises, nothing that would leap out at her and force the air from her lungs.

Alicia listened to the landing clock ticking, loud against the silence, as Justin nodded defeatedly and walked away. How she wished she could wrench the hands of the clock back, eradicate time, her mistakes – and the cruellest second of all, in which God had taken their baby away.

Not God.

Her. Getting unsteadily to her feet, she walked towards the window. She’d been responsible for Lucas’s death. If not for her lies, her weakness, none of this would have happened. She might have remembered to fill up her own car had she not been so distracted by Paul Radley. Justin wouldn’t have been driving her. If only she’d been honest, neither of them would have been distracted that day from what mattered most in the world: their family. Justin wouldn’t be facing pain after insurmountable pain. She should have told him the truth. It was too late now.

‘Where are you, baby?’ she whispered glancing up at the stars, twinkling brightly against a vast canvas of black. ‘Where are you, my beautiful baby boy?’ Closing her eyes, she pressed his little quilt close to her face and allowed her tears to finally spill over.

She wasn’t aware Justin had come back until he reached for her. Alicia leaned into him as he eased her to face him. She couldn’t help herself. She didn’t deserve him, but she so needed him, wanted to morph into him, never let go of him. Knew, as the hand of the clock ticked past this moment, that he didn’t want to let go of her either.

But he would. He was blaming himself. It wasn’t his fault. None of it.

She’d wanted to save him and now she would destroy him.

Pressing her face hard into his shoulder, Alicia tried and failed to still the sobs that shook through her body. ‘I’m sorry,’ she choked wretchedly, blinded by snot and tears. ‘So, so sorry.’

‘Shhh,’ he murmured, softly stroking her hair, as if she were a child in need of comfort. And she was. Oh God, how she was. ‘You have nothing to be sorry for.’

Alicia heard a sob catch in his throat.

And her heart cracked wide open.