On a stiflingly hot night Crystal gets up and stands in the bath with a sheet wrapped around her and turns on the creaking shower. It’s nowhere near as cold as she needs it to be, but it’s better than nothing. The tepid spray spills over her upturned face, hits the sheet, and battens it down until it sticks to her like a new skin, redrawing the outline of her body, bigger.

She stays under for several minutes, then she drags her sopping train after her back to Billy’s room and flings herself onto the bed. The sheet presses heavily down. It’s almost like another body lying on her but it’s more comforting than that – it blots out the world and buries her. It could stifle her if she wanted.

She tries to relax, all too aware that she must make the most of this short period of coolness and get to sleep, because in fifteen minutes she and the sheet will both be bone dry again.

There’s a movement in her womb. She peers beneath the tent of the sheet as if she might see a sign of life.

Do that again, she whispers. Do it.

It kicks again. That’s it, she says. Hello. I’m your mother.

Mother. The word triggers an avalanche of emotions. Panic, dread, regret. Guilt. And a terrible, tumbling sadness. But there is also hope mixed up in there somewhere, and this is the one she clings to. She’s been aware of it amassing tentatively inside her for a few weeks now, as if this new baby had spied the last few shreds of optimism on the far-flung edges of its mother’s existence and lured them back to her core.

In this action of her unborn child, Crystal glimpses the potential for love, a narrowing of her loneliness, a new-found energy. Already this pregnancy is nothing like the first. This time she is ready. This time she will give herself – wholly, completely, gladly – to the tiny creature inside her. Every ounce of love she can muster.

She turns to face the grey square of light at the window. Billy’s window. The curtain moves against the sill. Inside her chest a tight sob is gathering momentum. Oh, Billy, Billy, Billy, she thinks as it bursts out. It has come too late, this love, I  know. Too late, too late, too late.