Chapter 1

Forty minutes before they opened my son's chest, my husband told the ward clerk to cross himself out and write another woman's name beside mine.

He had to say it twice. The seventh floor at half six is not a quiet place. A man along the row was on the phone to his brother, shouting the ward number down the line. Somebody's kid was running a toy car along the skirting board and making the noise for it.

"Take mine off," Nathan said. "Put Bridget where mine was."

The clerk looked at me instead of at him.

I had Oliver's trainers in my lap. Both of them, laces still tied, because our son was seven and wouldn't have them undone. He was in bay six in a gown with rockets on it.

"He goes in at seven," I said.

"I know what time he goes in."

Bridget was down at the far end, under the sign for the lifts. The woman he loved before he met me, standing with her coat hanging open because it wouldn't go round her any more. Seven months, maybe eight. She had a balloon weight in a carrier bag.

"Is she family?" the clerk asked.

"She's about to be," Nathan said.

I set both trainers on the counter, side by side, the way Oliver leaves them.

"The doctor said forty percent," I said. "He said it to both of us. You were sitting beside me and you wrote it on your hand."

"Forty's not the number that matters." He was already half turned. "Sixty is."

"Look at me and say the whole sentence," I said.

He picked his phone up off the counter and checked the top of the screen.

"Say it. Our son goes in at seven and you're going where."

"To a party," he said. "There's a box, and it goes off pink or blue, and she wants me there when it opens. Twenty minutes. I'll be back before they close him up."

"You won't."

"Tessa." He said my name the way you say excuse me to a stranger standing in a doorway. "Twenty minutes."

"Nathan," Bridget called. "The car's on a meter."

He went the length of that corridor to her and did it in front of all of them. His hand on the back of her head, his mouth on her temple, slow, the way you hold on to something you intend to keep. The man on the phone stopped shouting. The clerk found something to look at on her screen.

Then the lift took them and the numbers went down.

She turned the sheet round to face me. Two lines. His was scratched through with one stroke, hard enough to score the page underneath.

I wrote my name on the first line.

Then I wrote it again on the second.

"Both?" she said.

"Both."

She moved her finger down the page and stopped on a small square. "Sole guardian. If you tick it, he can't undo it tonight."

"Then give me the pen back."

I ticked it. Underneath they wanted the call list — who to ring when he comes off the table, and who to ring if he doesn't. There was room for three. I wrote my number, and I wrote my number again, and I left the third one empty.

Then I picked up one of Oliver's trainers and turned it over and read the size off the sole. Eleven. I read it until the number stopped moving.

"Seven oh four," the clerk said. "That's when they'll make the first cut. I'll come and find you."

I carried the trainers back to the alcove outside bay six and sat down. His coat was still over the back of the chair across from mine, arms hanging, collar turned up where he'd left it, still shaped like a man who meant to stay all night.