I pull the duvet up close to my chin. I’ve started sleeping with the bedside lamp on and a Spotify playlist of ambient music playing in the background. If I’m not distracted, then I cannot stop thinking about the children in the attic. In the dark silence of my bedroom, I can hear as clear as day the click of the suitcase latches opening. I can smell the decay seeping from it and I can see the shape of that poor mite’s skull.

It’s selfish, I know, but the only positive outcome of my fall from the ladder more than two months ago now is that I didn’t have time to make sense of anything else up there. Poor Finn saw those remains for longer than I did. He hasn’t told me if that image haunts him like it does me and I haven’t asked. We used to talk about everything but now we brush so much under the carpet there’s an elephant-shaped lump there.

I toss and turn, unable to find a comfortable position. The painkillers I took earlier for a persistent headache must contain caffeine because, when I turn the music off, my active brain moves up a gear and I’m staring into that suitcase again. It’s not just at night when I’m like this. I can be looking at Sonny’s outfits and they’ll bring back images of shrink-wrapped children’s clothes placed in front of the cases. Or if I close my eyes in the shower my legs feel as if they’re about to buckle and I’m going to plummet down that

ladder again. My brain is trapped in a moment it won’t let me leave. I obsess about those children more than I do about my own son. And Finn knows it.

I see how he looks at me when I’m with Sonny; appraising me, studying me to see if my baby and I have connected as we should have. But I don’t think Finn has ever once asked himself why I am so distant. He has never tried to understand what’s turned me into someone who’s only going through the motions of being a mother. He doesn’t know I’m like this because I spend my life in perpetual fear. I’m so scared that if I allow myself to completely fall in love with Sonny, I’ll make another careless mistake and something even more terrible will happen to him. The weight of responsibility feels like too much so I am keeping him at arm’s length for his own sake. Through my own stupidity I brought him into this world too soon. I couldn’t live with myself if he left it just as quickly. It would break me.

Debbie has been an incredible support. I’m not sure what I would do without her. ‘I’m sure you’re doing the best you can,’ she tells me. But her encouragement falls on deaf ears. With my wrist still in plaster and my caesarean wound still fragile, I struggle to even pick him up, so she changes Sonny’s nappy and clothes, comforts him when he cries, and feeds him milk I’m expressing into bottles because I’m too frightened to allow him to latch on to my breast in case I fall asleep and he chokes. I witness her do all of this without complaint and with the ease of a seasoned pro. And I worry, when I’m healed, will I ever be the mother Sonny needs? She is more of a parent to him than I am.

I’ve come to realise that I misjudged her. I based what I thought I knew about parenting on my own mum’s hands-off approach. I thought Debbie’s behaviour to be extreme, but this is how mothers are supposed to be, protective of their brood even way into adulthood. They fight your corner.

My body will soon be mended, but my head is in far from normal working order. Debbie is right when she says Sonny is a miracle baby and lucky to be alive considering how he came into the world. And I’m forever reminding myself of the stupid risks I took with him before he was born. My only job was to grow him and protect him and I was too selfish and stubborn to get that right. I didn’t cut down on my working hours despite my high blood pressure, and then I almost killed him by climbing that ladder.

I don’t know how I’m ever going to be the mum he needs or deserves. I’m just grateful I can trust Debbie to help me.