The baby had no name because they couldn’t agree on one. She was twenty-nine, and he was thirty-two, and they were going nowhere, but she fell pregnant. And she thought this might be somewhere she wanted to go with him. Only when it happened did she become aware of this urge, like the unfurling of a moonflower. Some process had taken place inside her in the dark, and much later she saw herself in the light, and knew: This is who I am. But Jack noticed none of this. The baby woke every night – wanting to be fed, held, changed, rocked, carried to the broad sash of sky at the window, all the things any newborn wants – and Jack dragged a blanket to the living room, leaving Mara in the bedroom with the baby. In the morning, Jack would shrug his shoulders: ‘You know I have to be alert for work.’

Mara didn’t mind those sleepless hours alone with this unfamiliar-familiar person. Something sacred was unfolding in the inchoate night, galaxies colliding and moving apart. She whispered to the baby while feeding him – words that came easily to her, making her think maybe she had been loved once, by someone whose face was unreachable now. Her own mother was a blank space – someone her father referenced with brittle, halting words.

‘It’s okay, baby. It’s okay, Robin,’ Mara said, bending over her son’s head to study the astral blue of his eyes, yet to solidify into a particular colour. The mother’s voice is a kind of naming. The first moments of light and sound reaching down through space and time to leave an indelible mark. It was the Big Bang, over and over, that infinite love. So she called him Robin, and when he heard his name, he turned, and this was love moving, arcing through the air between them. Nobody could cross it. Her voice was a kind of naming, too.

But Mara didn’t tell Jack that she used the name he rejected. Every time she said Robin, she was calling something impossible into being. It was a spell. It was a lullaby. At night, and in the day, it kept Mara going, to have this secret only she and her son knew.