The garden came up well this year, he decides. He traces the outline, taking in each blossom and quietly noting the shape, the delicate form, each one gently holding its poise before beginning to dance when the summer came in a few months.

This is his escape.

He stops, contemplating one particular area, full of a type that he confused with so many of the others, his head cocked lazily to one side. Suddenly, he laughs; the colour of the flowers is the exact same shade as his wife’s favourite hair colour, and he wonders if she has done this on purpose. A faint smile plays at the edges of his lips as he imagines her doing this.

The smile falters, jarred, as soon as it comes. He hears a shout from the house, and his stomach lurches, rather like the sensation of being pulled away by a portkey. A portkey, pulling him to his wife’s side.

She calls for him again, but this time the shout is broken by a cry of pain that he could never imagine she, or any other person, had the ability to make.

On arrival, he finds her mother fretting, fetching bowls of hot water, towels, clean sheets. He offers a helping hand, but he’s needed elsewhere, and instead takes the hand of his wife, sprawled uncomfortably on her side, arms and legs all indicating different directions. He mimics her position, slowly adjusting hers to something easier, the milk-familiar foetal. She’s an antique child’s toy to him, something that needs to be treated with the utmost respect and tenuity.

When he’s satisfied of her comfort, or the closest that he believes she can call comfort currently, he reaches over her shoulders and feels the hard, unnatural thing that was to be inside her for just a few hours longer. Was it normal to be scared? Scared that he hadn’t created a monster like himself? Scared that this phenomenon of nature would have a cursed life from the moment he was born? It’s the uncertainty that causes his feelings of dread to equal his feelings of concern for his wife, who smiles weakly at his touch, and there’s something else there, something he can’t, through all the confusion, place his finger on.

She raises her hand and fumbles with his own, her clammy fingers attempting to lace, to twine with his and eventually they do. He winces as she attempts to pass her pain through this connection; once, twice, three times, she bores into him, little groans escaping her lips and all his fears disappear, washed away in an instant by a flood of solicitude. She whispers to him in incoherent fragments, her voice ebbing in and out, the irresolute tide gracing the shores of strength.

Her mother’s here now – she’s ready; her face is stained red and the ever-deepening wrinkles on her face more prominently defined, but still, she’s ready.

Is he ready?

Ready to face up to the consequences of what he’s inflicted on her?

He honestly doesn’t know, but now he has to be.

He shifts backwards, away from her, but still keeping hold of her hand, desperately trying to prevent it slipping from her grasp and breaking the tenuous connection. He slides his free arm around her shoulders, and following the instructions fired at him by her mother, whose hands are around her knees, aid her gently to turn over onto her back just as another shattering blow hits her body.

Her mother seems to be undecided in her approach to this. It’s been years, twenty four long, stretched out years since she was in a situation that was at all similar, and that one had passed in a haze of pain. She doesn’t know whether to be sympathetic, or firm, or encouraging. For once, she’s at a loss as to how to help her little girl.

Like a child, he thinks. Just like I said, she’s a child.

At the moment, he feels more like a father than a husband.

Soon, very soon now, he’ll be both.

His wife’s legs are spread. This is no time for dignity. The rare skirt she is wearing is folded over, onto her stomach. No time for dignity. Pale, clammy and exposed, she has never seemed more vulnerable.

Her mother plunges her hands into the scalding water laying beside them precariously on the edge of the bed, and tells him to do the same. He does so, numbly, barely feeling the sting against his skin. He feels guilty about letting go, for the sound that comes next is indescribable, like her body is breaking apart.

He doesn’t dare look at what her mother is doing, and her words on encouragement fall only onto his deaf ears. He doesn’t want to listen to anything more, he doesn’t want to hear the sounds of her body slowly self-destructing. It’s only when her mother calls his name, when she tells him to reach down to where her hands are that he gets a hint, just a tiny piece of what all of this was for. He still doesn’t look, doesn’t want to see, but something new is there, something round, something that feels like velvet.

Suddenly there’s more, more substance, more being in his hands, and then more, a new shape forming, attached to the first by sinews and strings and the wonder of the human body, and there’s more there and a cry, and another sound like a radio crackling, and he dares to look over her knee and in his hands is the perfect, unblemished life that he and his wife have made together and he is crying, crying at this miracle lying there covered in blood and god knows what else, tears rolling down his cheeks, and both of the women are crying as well with relief, and with sheer overwhelmedness.

His trembling hands break the last remaining physical bond between mother and son, and he takes him in his arms before passing him to his wife, nearly on the verge of collapse but still smiling, smiling disorientatedly as she gives the boy the name of her father, and then his father.

The little boy smiles placidly. He must be tired. And she must be tired too. He watches the pair drift off into a healing sleep, before leaving to spread the news