It was a sensible suggestion, and I resented it only because sense had been absent from so much of this story for so long.

Before we left, Camilla pulled a sealed envelope from her bag.

“These are copies of letters I tried to send you,” she said.

“You don’t have to read them in front of me.” I took them home and sat at the kitchen table after Chloe was asleep.

In one letter Camilla wrote about the first time she felt her baby move.

In another she described how frightened she was of childbirth and how badly she wished we could have spoken face to face.