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Viewing Cotters’ Yard in high summer and signing Florence up on a whim had not given them an accurate picture of the profoundly depressing space under a railway arch that received no natural light for three hundred days of the year.

They’d also completely messed up their timing.

On Coralie’s side, Antoinette had communicated clearly through word and deed that twelve months was too long a mat leave and that nine months would be more suitable for the agency and Coralie. What could she say to that?

Then came Brexit: the in/out referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union.

His workload as a political commentator doubled.

His stress trebled. The morning after the Brexit vote, Coralie rolled over to her bedside table and, still with her eyes closed, reached out to pick up her phone.

To her surprise, Adam prized it from her hand.

“Don’t look,” he said. “Stay not knowing as long as you can.”

Breastfeeding had been hard for Coralie: Whether it was the angle, or a special sensitivity, or Florence’s “latch,” or bad luck, her left breast couldn’t hack it, even with a nipple shield, and she’d had to feed the baby on the right while milking her left into a bottle with a machine, before topping up Florence with the bottle if she wanted it or filing the contents away in a sachet to freeze with the date on it.

Engaged in this complex multistep operation the morning of June 24, she’d only half watched the BBC as the pound plunged and David Cameron resigned.

The dream of “short days with a swim” was over.

“Great, so now my baby’s starting nursery in January, and she’ll be doing long days.”

“Not long days,” Adam protested. “Just days !”

In the first week of January, Coralie and Adam were encouraged to sit on the sidelines for an hour and observe Florence “settling in,” which she appeared to do instantly, sprawling on the carpet in the Baby Room and gnawing her plastic giraffe as, around her, her peers crept or wriggled, coughing like barking seals.

A staff member swooped to wipe a child’s nose with a torn-off piece of blue industrial hand towel.

It was the hand towel that got Coralie, and she cried in Climpsons afterward, burying her face in her daughter’s silky hair and breathing in her lovely smell.

It was so rough, she tried to explain, the towel and the gesture; she’d never put something so rough on her girl’s beautiful face and do it—the wiping—so roughly .

“But we’d also never lie on the floor to build and rebuild a block tower,” Adam said.

“Or play peekaboo for more than a minute. Or read a book in that slow, singsong voice, or have other kids her own age around and so many nice toys. She’ll have so much stimulus in that nursery, so much to think about and do. ”

It was true Coralie couldn’t see herself doing that kind of stuff.

She read, of course—various Mogs, Totally Wonderful Miss Plumberry , Possum Magic , Koala Lou : books of a vintage that could almost have been read to her (though she only remembered reading alone).

But playing: no. Crying had been the order of the day for the first two months of Florence’s life, for both of them.

Then their world had become more predictable.

Nappies always. Sleeping sometimes. The laborious breastfeeding stuff.

In between, they enjoyed companionable parallel lives: Florence on her soft sheepskin sent by Elspeth from Australia, grasping for the toys on the wooden arch; Coralie cooking and tidying, always keeping an eye on her in her small playpen in the kitchen.

They listened to audiobooks over the Bluetooth speaker, Wolf Hall first, and Bring Up the Bodies , and all the P.

D. Jameses and John le Carrés, all narrated by the same man, so that the happiest time in her life would be forever linked with the voice of Michael Jayston.

Zero conference calls. No client emails.

No one bothered her. She was exactly the right amount of alone.

And on the weekends, when Zora came round, Coralie had the ongoing marvel and good fortune of watching her girls fall in love.

Aged eight, having not cared about dolls since she was five, Zora rediscovered baby Layla from the toy box.

She gently bathed the plastic parts of Layla’s body (the middle was made of cloth).

She changed her nappy (a tea towel) and swaddled her (also in a tea towel).

On walks, Layla was strapped to her chest in Adam’s Liverpool Football Club scarf.

At the end of Year 3 assembly, Coralie found herself swamped by Zora’s peers, all stroking the soft top of Florence’s head with eager, gentle hands.

She enjoyed it too much, loved it too much, for it to be good mothering .

Adam was right: The baby needed someone who’d sit on the floor with her and gasp “Oh no!” when a tower fell down.

Coralie had never heard of the songs the staff performed in the circle on the carpet.

( Pull, pull, clap, clap, clap. ) Soon, too soon, the jig was up.

She redownloaded Outlook on her phone. Florence would be handed over to the reliable care of professionals.

The Baby Room manager talked a big game about accommodating expressed milk for bottle feeds.

For day two, when “settling in” was longer and would include “snack,” Coralie defrosted a sachet from her dwindling stockpile.

Her milk had dried up a few weeks before she was due to return to work, and because it had not been her choice to stop breastfeeding, and because breastfeeding had been so complicated and hard-won, she didn’t feel that sense of liberation other women described at getting their “body back.” Florence could have Coralie’s body as long as she wanted.

In fact, if Coralie could have, she’d have carried her around in a pouch.

The nursery provided “snack” (“handmade organic vegetable purées and finger foods”), but she’d kept the milk as a connection between mother and baby to help Florence cope with her absence and herself cope with the absence of Florence.

“She didn’t take her bottle, mama!” Liliana reported at pickup.

“Oh no—what did you do with the leftover milk?”

“I put it out—in the bin? For good hygiene.”

The logic couldn’t be faulted, but that milk was of her body , and now it was in the bin .

Florence, that other precious product of her body, was safe in Coralie’s arms, but an air of threat enveloped her, as well as a bad new smell of other children’s nappies.

Even her toy cat, Catty, smelled like the nursery.

For this they’d be paying ￡1,650 a month.

That night, after Florence’s bedtime, Coralie cried and couldn’t stop.

“It’s only hard for you because you love her,” Adam said. “ Because you’re such a good mother.”

“I feel bad because I am bad,” Coralie sobbed.

It was possible some hormones were at play.

There hadn’t been much breastfeeding or pumping toward the end, but stopping completely was a big shock for the body.

There was anxiety, too, about leaving the home—which she’d made perfect and was in charge of—and going back into the impersonal office to be at the mercy of others.

Everything about her was vulnerable and soft.

Her trousers still had an elastic waist. What if she was the scared one, not Florence, and Florence was actually fine?

Either way, by the second week of January, her darling baby was a full-time inmate at a lightless germ prison.

Sitting on a crowded 55 bus, Coralie could either collapse crying from missing her or vow to one day brutally exact her revenge on Adam.

(Why Adam? Why not? Somehow she knew he was to blame.)

Florence, Flossie, Floss-Floss, Rennie, Wren, Birdy, Cheep-Cheep. Crying and missing was too painful, so revenge it would have to be.