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She impulse-booked a gender scan on Ultrasound Direct as soon as her pregnancy app said “Baby” was sixteen weeks.

“See those three lines?” the sonographer said.

Adam was beaming.

“What do they mean ?” Coralie almost shouted.

“It’s the vagina!” the woman said. “It’s a girl.”

It was a beautiful autumn day. They walked for a while, elated, then went for ramen in a chain restaurant near Bank.

In the bathroom, she took out the printed scans to look at them in private.

Inky black, a ghostly white outline, her daughter’s perfect nose.

Then she cried because her dream had come true.

Her baby, her girl. Florence, like Florence Falls—they decided the name before they’d finished their lunch.

Walking back from the Tube that afternoon, they stopped off at Cotters’ Yard, the most highly reviewed nursery in London Fields for ages six months to five, and put the baby down to start in March 2017, the week she was due to turn one.

Hubris? Choosing a name at sixteen weeks?

Putting a fetus down for childcare? Already it seemed astounding that sex had resulted in a pregnancy.

For a pregnancy to result in a baby, so much had to go right, and nothing could afford to go wrong.

Was it true she should buy different brands of kale, all grown in different locations, to mix up her consumption of pesticides?

“In 1997, before the election,” Adam said, “people all used the same phrase about Labour’s huge lead in the polls. ”

“Okay.” She sighed. “What?”

“Blair was like a man carrying a priceless Ming vase across a highly polished floor.”

Actually, it was exactly how Coralie felt.

She made the mistake of confiding in Adam’s mother, who was a doctor, after all, and so might’ve had something to offer, if not emotionally, at least scientifically. “It’ll be fine,” Anne briskly said.

And was it fine? Was she ? She was in nesting mode, warm-bath mode, cossetted by Adam, stood up for on the Tube.

Popping into hospital for her scans, or the community center for her midwife appointments, she felt like a VIP, albeit one of many VIPs in an overcrowded waiting room.

She transformed her pink study into a tranquil yellow nursery.

From Dalston Oxfam, for ￡20, she found a chest of drawers exactly the right size and height for a changing table.

The top drawer she filled with minuscule newborn nappies.

In the other drawers, she stored cotton squares for wiping, muslin cloths for burping, a brush with the softest bristles, a floating bath thermometer in the shape of a flower, sleepsuits, nipple cream, little hats, scratch mitts—yes, she had everything (except a baby).

“I miss your pink room,” Zora said.

Coralie didn’t. She hadn’t done any of the work she’d expected to do there. Letting go had been a relief.

Eighteen months on, Zora’s relationship with her new brother remained boundaried and courteous.

(Coralie imagined a bottle of champagne in a wooden gift box: “Rup, it has been a pleasure getting to know you. I look forward to many more years of fruitful association—Z.”) Now that she read a minimum of two parenting books a week, Coralie could see that none of the adults in Zora’s life had properly “made space” for her feelings after Rup’s birth.

She took Zora to Violet for a banana muffin and a chocolate milk.

“I wonder if you’re worried about things changing—when your baby sister comes? ”

“They will,” Zora said.

“How?”

“Grown-ups get tired and stressed. No one reads to me at night. Rabbitty doesn’t like it.”

Keep reading to Zora , Coralie mentally noted.

When she wiped and saw her mucus plug, a formless splodge at first, then (upon more wiping) something as solid as a creature washed up on a beach, she thought, with happiness, and not even a flicker of stress: This is it.

She’s coming. But then she went into labor.

Far from something natural, it was like a sinkhole swallowing a car, the Boxing Day tsunami, an air-raid siren, a bomb blast, an emergency.

Her mind simply went ; she became not Coralie, a mother-to-be with a girl inside her, but some other fucked-up mixture: a wild creature craving the woods, desperate to run, to hide, and to die; her mother waiting for Dr. Ainslie, the sheet pulled up to her chin; a GIF she’d once seen by accident of a man run over by a truck.

A full night, a full day, and half a night at home. A journey to the hospital, where she was probed in a cubicle, the curtain half drawn. “I can offer you paracetamol,” the midwife said. Adam’s face ashen in the taxi back home.

Another journey, examined again, only three centimeters dilated but running a temp, better to be safe than sorry, we’ll have to find you a room.

Gas and air: Everything turned white. She saw the boxes of books she’d gathered since she was a child, transported from boarding school to uni, to her flat with Josh in Melbourne, the freight company picking them up.

She saw them as if she’d been there, watching her mother take delivery of them, storing them not in the spare room, where she’d promised, but under the house, uncared for and exposed.

“Otherwise,” she said urgently to Adam, “why would they…?” Get moldy, she meant; carted off to the dump. “No,” she moaned. “Stop!”

Adam’s worried face as he whispered with a midwife. The gas and air were taken away. Pethidine (she spewed on the floor). Curl over, that’s right. Hug the pillow. Blissful needle in the spine. Reunited with her mind. God, how she’d missed it, and those other dear companions, her thoughts.

Alert, sitting up, she monitored Florence’s heartbeat bouncing on the screen, as if she herself were a doctor.

It didn’t look great. “Baby” was “finding it stressful,” the doctors said.

Would Coralie agree to a cesarean? The risk-assessment document warned of paralysis, cardiac failure, death.

Surgery— her mother waking up in Brisbane with half her insides gone.

Still, it was time for this baby to be (in the words of the influencers she’d ill-advisedly followed on Instagram) “earthside”!

On the last page of the consent form, she wrote (and seeing her own handwriting was like seeing an old friend): “Do NOT remove any organs no matter what you find inside.” She double-underlined the NOT , signed her name, and was wheeled away.

When Florence was placed on her chest, vast black eyes staring up at her, Coralie became Coralie again (broken, yes, but no longer mad) and something new altogether—a mother.