And I watched him work out what that sentence actually contained, which took him about three seconds, and which I had not expected to be the thing that broke him.

It was not the accusation.

He had been braced for accusations all the way across town in Brian’s car.

It was the arithmetic of it.

A woman flat on her back with a dressing across her abdomen and no sensation below her ribs, and two newborns eighteen inches away in plastic cots, and no mechanism at all for closing that gap except another person’s hands.

He had measured the boot of the car.